Underground economy expected to boom
Japan Times
"No money and you're dead" is essentially what yakuza characters in novels and comic books say, and they mean that literally.
Cash-strapped for over a decade after the asset price bubble burst in the early 1990s, the underworld is now seeing a rise in dirty money to help keep yakuza thriving, economists say.
"In the next five years, Japan's underground economy will expand at a rate of 2 percent to 3 percent; that's faster than the potential growth rate for the legal economy, which is about 1.5 percent," said Takashi Kadokura, a senior economist at Dai-ichi Life Research Institute and an author of several books on the underground economy.
In addition to a rising number of Internet-related crimes, drug-trafficking and crimes by minors, Kadokura said higher taxes will encourage evasion and increase the amount of dirty money in the economy.
Projections like these while the public debt continues to grow begs the question: Is there a way to smoke dirty money out to benefit the economy as a whole?
