The Money Laundry: Regulating Criminal Finance in the Global Economy

Despite its ineffectiveness, AML policy has spread via three paths. The Financial Action Task Force, the key standard-setter and enforcer in this area, has successfully implemented a strategy of blacklisting to promote compliance. Publicly identified as noncompliant, targeted states suffered damage to their reputation. Subsequently, officials from poor countries became socialized within transnational policy networks. Finally, international banks began using the presence of AML policy as a proxy for general country risk. Developing states have responded by adopting this policy as a functionally useless but symbolically valuable way of reassuring powerful outsiders. Since the financial crisis of 2008, the G20 has used the successful methods of coercive policy diffusion pioneered in the AML realm as a model for other global governance initiatives.