A systematic literature review of illicit financial flows and money laundering. Current state of research and estimation methods

This dataset constitutes Appendix 1 to the article submitted to the Journal of Economics and Management. It contains a list of 1,135 academic articles included in the thematic synthesis analysis. This appendix provides transparency into the literature classification process and supports the reproducibility of the review.The aim of the paper is to examine the current state of research on illicit financial flows (IFF) and money laundering (ML), with a particular focus on the detection and estimation methods. This review includes a screening analysis of 1,249 articles from two major databases - Scopus and Web of Science - providing a comprehensive view of the existing literature. Thematic synthesis of 1,135 articles, following the approach of Tiwari, Gepp and Kumar (2020), enabled the classification of the selected studies into relevant subject areas. As a result of thematic synthesis, the literature was divided into six dimensions: AML framework, regulations and their effectiveness, new ML opportunities, the role of actors and their relative importance, the impact of ML on the economy, IFF and ML detection and the scale of IFF and ML. Based on this analysis, two dimensions - IFF and ML detection, and the scale of IFF and ML - were selected for further exploration through textual narrative synthesis (TNS). This final synthesis of 234 papers, identifies the existing methods as well as the variables and proxies used in the literature to detect and estimate IFF and ML.