Abstract
Trafficking in persons, or human trafficking, is an international phenomenon that has received increasing attention from scholars. This study uses bilateral human trafficking data to test whether or not relative deprivation is a better explanatory factor of the likelihood of country-to-country human trafficking connections than simply using individual country scores. I use five indicators that measure development, economic health, and political health across 183 countries in the international system. These indicators have been broadly used in the literature to provide explanation for other societal problems like crime, political conflict, and shadow economies. Deprivation scores are calculated for each country-pair using these five indicators. I compare raw scores and deprivation scores using social network analysis and temporal exponential random graph models (TERGM) methodology. I find that each group of indicators – development, economic health, or political health – features both significant raw scores and significant relative deprivation terms. Furthermore, both raw score terms and relative deprivation terms mainly remain significant in models including both raw scores and inequality scores. While further questions exist within this vein of research, the international community might opt to take either a rising tide approach – raising indicator scores in all countries – or an equality promotion approach – minimizing inequality between pairs of countries – to combat the flow of global human trafficking. Both raw scores and relative deprivation scores are significant indicators of international human trafficking connections and goodness of fit measures do not clearly establish whether raw scores or deprivation scores are better indicators.