Strengthening Evidence-based Policy Making on Security and Justice in Mexico

Security and justice are core responsibilities of the State, and the foundations of good governance and healthy democracies. Moreover, they are precursors to economic growth and competitiveness, with potential impacts on businesses' transaction costs and the quality of human capital. Generating and utillising evidence on security and justice therefore is key to strengthening justice sector performance and reducing crime. This can pose a challenge to governments however as crime is a distrinctly territorial phenomenon, particularly in Mexico. This study offers a framework to treat security and justice as a central concern of public policy. It examines the availability and quality of sub-national level data in Mexico, and discusses how to transform this data into evidence that can feed into each stage of the policy cycle. It presents available indicators at sub-national level in Mexico and compares the extent to which crime and justice data follow regional paterns with respect to a sample of other OECD Member Countries.