Human Trafficking Indicators: A New Dataset

This manuscript describes the Human Trafficking Indicators (HTI) dataset, a new resource for research on the causes of, and policy responses to, human trafficking. HTI includes country-year level information on forty-six variables for up to 184 countries from 2000 to 2017. It is the first dataset to broadly capture different trafficking types and disaggregated measures of government responses. It includes seven types of trafficking including forced labor, sexual exploitation, domestic servitude, and debt bondage. The HTI also includes eighteen measures of a government’s prosecution, protection, and prevention efforts. This paper presents an overview of the dataset, explains how it differs from other sources, describes several empirical trends, and highlights HTI’s potential uses with a brief empirical example.