By Anja Shortland, Tom Keatinge and Jamie MacColl

Ransomware has become a major risk to global business and undermines national economic and societal resilience. Some consider that generous insurance-funded ransom payments are a major contributor to the problem, but many think insurance should be part of the solution. This report examines research activities investigating ‘insurance as governance’ in the field of extortive crime. Insurers have a financial interest in limiting the losses they cover. It is commonly known that insurers routinely manage moral hazard and adverse selection among the insured population by incentivising behaviour that limits risk and penalises excessive risk taking. Insurers also create processes that reduce the overall cost of claims by making it more difficult for third parties to benefit from the insurance relationship.

This report applies this approach to insurance as crime governance.

By Richard Clutterbuck

Sources and Forms of Attack Kidnap and extortion in perspective - Types of abduction, extortion and intimidation - Criminal gangs - Politiecal terrorists - International exploitation and support Teehnological developments - The Growth of Kidnap and Extortion - Cost effeetiveness: high yield, low risk - Diplomatic kidnappings 1968--73 - Changing pattern of attaeks on diplomatie targets - Hijacking Kidnap and extortion in the business world

London; Palgrave Macmillan; New York: St. Martin's Press, 1987. 252p.

By Santiago Montenegro and Álvaro Pedraza

This paper tries to explain why kidnapping has fallen so dramatically in Colombia during the period 2000-2008. The widely held belief is that the falling kidnapping rates can basically be explained as a consequence of the success of President Alvaro Uribe's democratic security policy. Without providing conclusive alternative explanations, some academic papers have expressed doubts about Uribe' security policy being the main cause of this phenomenon. While we consider the democratic security policy as constituting a necessary condition behind Colombia's falling kidnapping rates, we argue in this paper that a complementary condition underlying this phenomenon has been the significant increase during this period in the speed and quality of communications between potential victims and public security forces. In this sense, the expansion of the mobile phone industry in Colombia implies that there has been a substantial reduction in information asymmetries between kidnappers and targeted citizens. This has led to a higher level of deterrence as well as to higher costs for perpetrating this type of crime. This has resulted in a virtuous circle: improved security allows higher investments in telecommunications around the country, which in turn lead to faster communications between citizens and security forces, which consequently leads to greater security. We introduce a Becker-Ehrlich type supply and demand model for kidnappings. Using regional and departmental data on kidnapping, the police and mobile phones, we show that mobile phone network expansion has expanded the effective coverage of public protection; this, in turn, has led to a spectacular reduction in kidnapping rates.

Bogotá, Colombia: Universidad de los Andes–Facultad de Economía–CEDE, 2009. 30p

By Roy K. Anderson.

“ At a time when the drug-evil, as it is called, is attracting so much attention all over the world, it does not seem out of place to tell the public something about how conditions brought it about.”

Calcutta: Thacker, Spink, 1922. 104p.