Exploring Trade-Based Money Laundering Research: A Bibliometric Review
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.51137/wrp.ijarbm.499Keywords:
Trade Based Money Laundering, International Trade, Laundering, Sanctions, Trade FinanceAbstract
International trade involves liberalization of trade restrictions on foreign goods and services. With liberalization, trade related compliance issues may arise resulting in trade-based money laundering financial flows. If not monitored and controlled, the illicit financial flows can be detrimental to the integrity of financial service sector at country and global level. This study explored trade-based money laundering research landscape through bibliometric analysis. The objectives being to identify the scholarly output performance for TBML and reveal the scientific mapping status of TBML. Documents were retrieved from Scopus database by applying the appropriate search key strings. This enabled identification of relevant documents which were further screened for completeness and relevance. Results were based on 164 documents which had an annual growth rate of 1.4%, indicating increase in TBML related scholarly output. In terms of scientific mapping, thematic mapping categorized the four quadrants based on the relevance degree against development degree, namely basic themes, niche themes, motor themes, and emerging or declining themes. Also, the findings revealed the growing influence of Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), free trade zones, trade finance documentation, sanctioned countries and digital based transactions. In conclusion, TBML is a growing subject which requires more support in terms of technical research from the FATF and subordinated organizations. Thus, the current regulations and frameworks being developed should align to the environment so that they do not become irrelevant. This novel study contributed to the TBML subject, by offering insights into the future emerging issues on TBML, thereby contributing to practice, policy and knowledge
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