Trade Misinvoicing in Developing Countries

This paper discusses selected issues in the analysis of trade misinvoicing. It starts by examining various motives for the misdeclaration of trade activities. It is argued that the broad range of incentives to fake customs declarations provides an important challenge for the empirical assessment of the extent of trade misinvoicing. After analyzing the costs and benefits of different empirical approaches to quantifying trade misinvoicing, the accuracy and reliability of estimation results reported in the literature are reviewed. It is shown that quantitative findings are heavily dependent on the underlying assumptions in the empirical analysis, making estimation results on trade misinvoicing practices largely a matter a faith.