Analysis Of The National Anti-Kidnapping Strategy

Prisoner's Dilemma could be represented with government agencies in the way they do not cooperate to maximize effectiveness. To some extent, if the rules are not clear when establishing responsibilities, distortions will be created to reduce crime. That is, each agency will have incentives to hide information, stop participating in certain processes and be overly involved when rules are not clear. To deal with this problem, three possible solutions are suggested: first, improve communication between agents; second, indirectly communicate what is planned to be done; and third, develop a reputation that makes agent’s actions more predictable.

In conclusion, transaction costs and vertical structures represent an impediment for government agencies

This crime represents a complex juridical figure because the implementation of law enforcement lies on several interpretations according to judges, people who commit the crime, the place where it was carried out and the means that were used (Gamboa and Valdés, 2008). In 2013, the incidence of this crime achieved more than 1.5 kidnappings per 100,000 inhabitants, the highest levels ever observed since the measurement of this variable began. As a response the federal government launched the National Anti-Kidnapping Strategy, which had the objective of articulating the coordination schemes between different levels of government and

The main reason is that coordination increased between both levels of government, particularly by reducing transaction costs and the creation of an agent that generated checks and balances in the institutional framework. Likewise, the new scheme changed the relative benefits of committing crimes, due to the higher probability of being detained and punished by federal law. Also, it was an effective measure at local level because incentives of persecuting crime where now focused, by providing extra-economic resources, on rewarding those institutions which had better outcomes. However, it is important to use some other tools in order to corroborate this approach, which can be studied from the econometric perspective.

The estimation of coordination in kidnappings is modelled in two steps. The first one consists on pairing the observations in function of observable characteristics, such as violence detected in previous years and economic conditions, and consequently generate a statistical estimator that weights this balance with original observations . On the other hand, the second step consists on using the generated weights and run an ordinary least squares (OLS) model selecting as dependent variable the number of kidnappings per 100,000