A rough guide to the value of various forms of illegal trade

SOLID numbers on illegal business are hard to come by. To estimate the size of the drugs trade, for example, researchers look at the quantity of drugs seized at the point at which they enter a country and combine it with the price of that drug in the market where they think it was heading. This requires building on suppositions and estimations: it is hard to know with much certainty how the quantity of, say, cocaine seized by border police relates to the worldwide supply. If anything, though, the numbers on drugs are better than those on counterfeit goods. Still, such illegal trade is sufficiently large to make it worthwhile making some informed guesses. Based on the work of various researchers, here is our reckoning of the biggest categories. All the numbers are the most recent ones available, but they are not all from the same year—something to bear in mind when making comparisons, or deciding whether a career in cigarette-counterfeiting might be more rewarding than one in trafficking human organs.