The impacts of organised crime in the EU: some preliminary thoughts on measurement difficulties

This article analyses the social construction of the problem of organised crime and associated problems of measurement. It reports on a study conducted for the European Parliament which had three principal aims: 1. To produce a critical assessment of the state-of-the-art in terms of what is and is not known about the prevalence and distribution of different forms of organised crime. 2. To set out a robust conceptual framework which would enable us to think more clearly and coherently about the costs of organised crime going forward. 3. To use this assessment and framework to interrogate empirical data on the costs of organised crime in the EU, where it is available and is judged to be reasonably valid and reliable, to produce informed estimates of what these social and economic costs might be. It comments on the conceptual and empirical problems involved in this exercise and the policy issues that arise in the context of it.