Empirical Analysis of the US State Department’s Annual Trafficking in Persons Report – Insights for Policy-Makers

Author: van der Vink, Gregory; Carlson, Katherine; Park, Jeffrey; Szeto, Sabrina; Zhang, Xinrei; Jackson, Michael & Phillips, Erica

Abstract: The State Department’s annual Trafficking in Persons (TIP) Report is the U.S. Government’s principal diplomatic tool to engage foreign governments on human trafficking. Each year, the report evaluates efforts to counter human trafficking, assigning each country to a tier level. We evaluate the relative role of various factors predictive of tier-level assignments, including (a) legislated changes to the ranking system, (b) party to the Palermo Protocol, (c) reported numbers of convictions, prosecutions, and identified victims, (d) independent estimates of prevalence, and (e) sample indicators of governance and economic development. We use singular-value decomposition to identify the relative influence among multiple inter-related factors across a matrix of tier rankings for twelve years and 189 nations. Our analysis indicates that investments in democratic institutions and individual rights may be significantly more influential than law enforcement, and the traditional economic theory for TIP vulnerability may be an oversimplification. Most significantly, the large number of attributes with small but statistically significant correlations with TIP tier levels confirms that TIP has many causal relationships. We affirm the need for Countering TIP (CTIP) strategies to apply an ecosystem approach with geographically targeted interventions consistent with Situational Crime Prevention.

Keywords: trafficking in persons, human trafficking, state department trafficking in persons report, tip, ctip, modern slavery