Money laundering: macroeconomic assessment methods and current trend in Ukraine

Abstract

The paper examines the scientists’ approaches to the evaluation of money laundering. Attention is drawn to the macroeconomic results of such an analysis. The research on the scope of money laundering and its impact on the country’s economy is reviewed. Relevant literature and selected techniques have been highlighted and are widely available in the world. The focus is on discussing the macroeconomic implications of money laundering and on finding methods for evaluating the various scales and conclusions reached by various scholars on the scope and flows of money laundering. An authors’ approach to the analysis of the phenomenon of money laundering is proposed based on the study of the links between the level of money laundering with the level of vulnerability of economic sectors and the spread of other negative socio-economic phenomena. Using unique empirical data obtained as a result of an expert survey in the field of money laundering, conducted a statistical analysis and test of the statistical hypothesis regarding the presence of interconnections and to determine the essential dependence of money laundering level on the selected indicators’ subgroups of macroeconomic nature for analysis based on Pearson and Kendall’s Taw correlation coefficients. The conclusions on the correlation between the level of money laundering in Ukraine and macroeconomic processes in Ukraine are substantiated: shadowing of economic relations, optimization of tax burden at the initiative of business entities and «prosperity» of money laundering due to strong corruption ties in this sphere. The grounds for determining the priorities of further state policy in the sphere of anti-money laundering have been formed, for the national financial monitoring of relevant benchmarks of increased risk of financial transactions in specific sectors of the economy and possible further methodological use of sectoral analysis (with wider coverage of the national economic sectors) money laundering risks.