**4. Conclusions**

This study brings a detailed insight on the evolution of the dimensions of the financial and economic crimes, with an explanatory approach of the top of frauds, corruption, shadow economy, money laundering, tax evasion with an emphasis on VAT lost revenues, cybercrimes as reflected by the Global Cybersecurity Index, malware and data breaches and card fraud losses, closely related to the specialised literature in this field. Our explanations and interpretations cover both the absolute values and the dynamics of these unwanted phenomena, for the particular situation of European countries, with a slight emphasis on Romania.

Our empirical analyses cover the EU member states and throughout the time frame of the last 15 years, the impact of the vector of financial and economic crime proxies upon the economic development measured as per capita GDP has proved to be stronger than their impact upon HDI as a proxy of sustainable human development. Nonetheless, in accordance to the reviewed literature, for our sample of European Union countries, corruption and shadow economy are indirectly related to their vector of development proxies while the money laundering and cybercrimes of the "white collars" are directly related to the vector of development proxies we study. All in all, reducing the shadow economy and corruption must be a top priority for governmental policies towards achieving economic development. According to our findings, their impact upon development is negative, so strict measures should be applied through various public policies in order to limit the flourish of corruption and shadow economy. Public private partnership agencies or private entities could also focus on diminishing corrupt behaviours and situations and reducing shadow economy phenomena, in order to obtain benefits in the fields of economic prosperity and societal wellbeing. Nonetheless, our estimations support a positive effect of cybercrime and money laundering upon development and the explanation resides in the boost registered by these undesired financial and economic crimes due to technological progresses and digitization. Also, highly skilled professionals might find it easy to engage in such activities. We consider that these actions and digital processes should be strictly monitored and regulated. The main policy implications of this research refer to the awareness of the level of economic and financial crime by the government authorities from the European countries in order to find the proper solutions to diminish it. These solutions should concern at least the following areas: improving the level of financial education of citizens in order to improve

### *Economic and Financial Crimes and the Development of Society DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.96269*

fiscal morality; improving the efficiency of recovery of the proceeds of crime while this level is still low; and increasing the degree of digitalization in public institutions, including the tax administration.

One of the limits of our study is related to the lack of data for a longer period, especially regarding the variables associated with digitization and cybercrime while these phenomena are relatively recent. Our data are the most recently available ones but they are still somewhat limited, not always covering the entire 2005–2020 time interval. For the future we intend to surpass these limits through the use of exploratory factor analysis on the multiple interrelated facets of the financial and economic crime phenomena, in order to have the conceptually defined dimensions further aggregated as newly derived factors. Furthermore, for a larger dataset of analysed countries, once we are able to enlarge our cross-sectional dataset, cluster analysis would help us form similar groups, on certain algorithms and probably obtain some interesting conclusions.
