The economics of gold smuggling
By GCRU Gold News on Saturday, December 27 2014, 23:49 - Permalink
The infiltration by gold smuggling cartels of the national airlines of Bangladesh was all over the news recently. This is a major cause of concern, especially as it appears that flight schedules were manipulated to facilitate the smuggling of gold. Have we, though, ever considered whether gold smuggling is bad for Bangladesh?
According to the National Board of Revenue (NBR), a record 565kg of gold was seized by the government in 2013-14. Ghulam Hussain, the chairman of NBR, has said that low gold import duty in Bangladesh, compared to that of India, encouraged smugglers to use Bangladesh as a transit route to channel gold into India.