Chasing Dirty Money: The Fight Against Money Laundering

National and international efforts to reduce money laundering were originally developed to reduce drug trafficking and have broadened over the years to address many other crimes and, most recently, terrorism. They now constitute a formidable regime applied to financial and nonfinancial institutions and transactions throughout much of the world. In this study, the authors (1) explore what is known about the scale and characteristics of money laundering, (2) describe the current anti-money laundering regime, (3) develop a framework for assessing the effectiveness of the regime, and (4) use that framework to assess how well the current system works and make proposals for its improvement.