ABSTRACT
Economic theory studies principally those transactions that are made in keeping with the law. Economists are interested in the ‘production processes and exchanges of goods and services regulated by the market and typically performed by profitoriented commercial enterprises acting in compliance with trading, tax and labor laws’ (Bagnasco, 1990, p. 159). On the other hand, deviant forms of behavior, which imply a violation of the law, refer to the subject of another social science, criminology. However, criminology lacks its own, purely criminological, methods for analyzing this particular subject. It borrows the methods of analysis from the law, economic theory, sociology, psychology and other sciences. Many criminologists would agree that their contacts with sociologists have led to significant progress in the understanding of deviant acts (see, for example, Yakovlev, 1988, p. 5; Gilinskij, 2002, pp. 13-15). The first contributions of neoclassical economists to criminological studies date back to the end of the 1960s, and economic influence has become increasingly important in recent decades (see, for example, Becker, 1993, pp. 389-392). In this chapter, we will try to develop an institutional approach to criminological problems, especially to the analysis of economic crimes. In § 1 the reader will find a discussion of different approaches to the classification of deviant acts. A description of the institutional environment stimulating crime and deviance will be provided in §2. A special case of networks, - criminal networks, is the principal subject of §3. In §4 we will turn to the issues of the empirical analysis of economic crimes. In the final section, §5, we will consider polemic aspects of the problems related to the prediction and the prevention of economic crimes.
