Approaches to Estimation the Scale of Money Laundering

During the last decades crime becomes an ever increasing problem which is turning into a profitable industry. Criminalization covers even larger parts of the economic life. Huge amounts of dirty money are generated and laundered through various schemes and entered into the legal economic and financial systems. The esti­mate of the size of these funds globally reaches several trillion dollars per year. Even if the accu­rate measuring of the scale of money laundering is not possible, there is a number of research­ers that develop and implement approaches for assessing money laundering in different states and worldwide. A significant part of these ap­proaches are little known and are not applied in Bulgaria. This article provides an overview of approaches to estimate the scale of money laundering found in the relevant literature. Ap­proaches are divided into two groups - macro­economic and microeconomic. In the text more attention is drawn to the most used and ad­vanced approaches, such as the “gravity model” used from John Walker that future researches could adapt and apply in measuring the scale of money laundering in Bulgaria.