Human Trafficking in Southeast Asia: Results from a Pilot Project in Vietnam

Ngan Dinh (), Conor Hughes (), James W. Hughes () and Margaret Maurer-Fazio
Additional contact information
Ngan Dinh: University of Cambridge
Conor Hughes: National Bureau of Economic Research
James W. Hughes: Bates College

No 8686, IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA)

Abstract: Human trafficking is one of the most widely spread and fastest growing crimes in the world. However, despite the scope of the problem, the important human rights issues at stake and the professed intent of governments around the world to put an end to "modern day slavery", there is very little that is actually known about the nature of human trafficking and those most at risk as potential victims. This is due in large part to the difficulty in collecting reliable and statistically useful data. In this paper we present the results of a pilot study run in rural Vietnam with the aim of overcoming these data issues. Rather than attempt to identify victims themselves, we rely on the form rural migration often takes in urbanizing developing countries to instead identify households that were sources of trafficking victims. This allows us to construct a viable sampling frame, on which we conduct a survey using novel techniques such as anchoring vignettes, indirect sampling, list randomization and social network analysis to construct a series of empirically valid estimates that can begin to shed light on the problem of human trafficking.

Keywords: human trafficking; labor migration; Vietnam; household survey; indirect sampling; social network analysis; pilot study; public policy (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: J47 J61 J82 K37 K42 O15 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 31 pages
Date: 2014-11
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-mig and nep-sea
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://docs.iza.org/dp8686.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:iza:izadps:dp8686

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
IZA, Margard Ody, P.O. Box 7240, D-53072 Bonn, Germany

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA) IZA, P.O. Box 7240, D-53072 Bonn, Germany. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Holger Hinte ().