Abstract
Worldwide human trafficking is the third most often registered international criminal activity, ranked only after drug and weapon trafficking. This article focusses on three questions: 1) How can human trafficking be measured? 2) What are the causes and indicators of this criminal activity which exploits individuals? 3) Which countries observe a high (or low) level of human trafficking inflow? We apply the Multiple Indicators Multiple Causes structural equation model to measure human trafficking inflows in a way which includes all potential causes and indicators in one estimation model. The human trafficking measurement focusses on international human trafficking. We use freely available existing data and thus generate an objective measure of the extent of trafficking. Countries are ranked according to their potential to be a destination country based on various characteristics of the trafficking process.
Highlights
Since human trafficking is the third largest kind of illicit international commerce, after illegal drug and weapon smuggling (U.S Department of State, 2004), it creates an underground economy of illegal labor markets and businesses where immense profits and great suffering go hand in hand
After testing for the robustness of the specification and evaluating the model fit, the final indices are generated for the years 2000 to 2010. In this way country rankings for every single country-year combination are generated, which makes it possible to assess the development of the extent of human trafficking over time
More international business and investments are correlated with illicit human movement in the form of human trafficking
Summary
Profit estimates range from 1 billion dollars (Belser, 2005) to 31.61 billion dollars at any given time (ILO, 2005; Interpol, 2012). This money is augmented by tax evasion and presumably used to finance the illegal businesses that traffic individuals, as well as other associated activities. The international nature of this crime means that an international response is needed in order to address policy approaches and legal measures successfully, due to the fact that the main problem in this field is the availability of comparable data. This article provides a first attempt at providing the literature with a new means of measuring human trafficking by using the structural equation approach.
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