The Political Economy of Refugee Migration

This article examines the driving forces of the magnitude, composition and duration of refugee movements caused by conflict and persecution. The decision to seek temporary or permanent refuge in the region of origin or in a more distant asylum destination is based on inter-temporal optimization. We find that asylum seeking in Western countries is rather a phenomenon of comparatively less persecuted people. In an attempt to reduce their respective asylum burdens, Western countries and host countries in the region of origin are likely to end up in a race to the bottom of restrictive asylum policies. As an alternative, this study shows that proactive refugee-related aid transfers are, under certain circumstances, an effective instrument to relieve Western countries from asylum pressure.Refugee Movements, Asylum Policy, Foreign Aid

Refugee movements and aid responsiveness

This article analyses the impact of refugee migration movements on the long-term and short-term aid allocation decisions of bilateral donors. We distinguish between different types of forced migrants: internally displaced persons (IDPs) that stay in their country of origin, cross-border refugees that flee to neighboring countries, and asylum seekers in Western donor states. For the period 1992 to 2003, empirical evidence on 18 donor and 148 recipient countries suggests that short-term emergency aid is given to all types of refugee situations, but is predominantly directed towards the countries of origin. For the allocation of long-term development aid, donor states focus even more on the sending-countries of forced migrants; in general, they increase aid volumes only for the home countries of refugees, not for the hosting countries. This preference for the countries of origin is even stronger when these are sendingcountries of asylum seekers to the Western aid-giving states.Bilateral aid allocation, refugee movements

Internal and international migration as response of double deprivation: some evidence from India

This study disentangles the effects of feelings of relative deprivation and the capability of households in realizing their migration aspirations. For this purpose we decompose the concept of relative deprivation into intra-group and inter-group relative deprivation and test their relative importance together with levels of absolute deprivation in shaping migration decisions on a household level. The migration decision itself is modelled as a two stage process which allows separating the decision on whether to migrate at all, and the decision where to migrate in terms of an internal or international destination. This study concentrates on migration in contemporary India, a country with about 20 million Indians living abroad and around 180 million people enumerated as internal migrants. The empirical analysis is based on a unique dataset based on the recent 64th round of the Indian National Sample Survey (NSS). This large dataset covers around 125,000 households and about 100,000 former household members enumerated as out-migrants. We hypothesize that feelings of relative deprivation have different effects on the choice of destination when controlled for alternative reference groups and group identifications. We identify the following factors as relevant in this migration decision-making process: First, intra-group as well as inter-group relative deprivations are strong predictors only for short distance intra-state movements. On contrary, the likelihood of out-migration towards international destinations is significantly lower for households with lower levels of intra-group and inter-group relative deprivation. Second, besides the effects of relative deprivation, absolute deprivation plays an ambivalent role: while economically better endowed households have a higher migration propensity to send (primarily male) migrants to distant inter-state and international destinations, the inverse is true for moves of shorter distance that are mainly dominated by (female) migrants stemming from poorer households

Burden-sharing or migration management?

This paper analyses the impact of refugee movements on emergency and development aid allocation decisions of bilateral donors in a political economic framework. We investigate two alternative hypotheses about donor motivations: first, an altruistic burden-sharing policy towards recipient countries that serve as hosts for a significant refugee population, and second, a more self-interested migration prevention policy focusing on recipient countries that actually cause refugee movements. We find some evidence that short-term humanitarian aid is predominantly used for burden-sharing purposes towards major refugee havens, while long-term development assistance is rather allocated to the source countries either to prevent further refugee outflows or to facilitate voluntary repatriation. Furthermore, it is evident that the inflow of asylum seekers into donor countries leads to a reallocation of aid funds to the respective countries of origin

Refugee movements and aid responsiveness

This article analyses the impact of refugee migration movements on the long-term and short-term aid allocation decisions of bilateral donors. We distinguish between different types of forced migrants: internally displaced persons (IDPs) that stay in their country of origin, cross-border refugees that flee to neighboring countries, and asylum seekers in Western donor states. For the period 1992 to 2003, empirical evidence on 18 donor and 148 recipient countries suggests that short-term emergency aid is given to all types of refugee situations, but is predominantly directed towards the countries of origin. For the allocation of long-term development aid, donor states focus even more on the sending-countries of forced migrants; in general, they increase aid volumes only for the home countries of refugees, not for the hosting countries. This preference for the countries of origin is even stronger when these are sending-countries of asylum seekers to the Western aid-giving states

Migration and aspirations: Are migrants trapped on a hedonic treadmill?

Based on longitudinal information from two waves of the Indonesian Family and Life Survey (IFLS) in 2000 and 2007, we find evidence that migrants are self-selected along higher individual aspirations acquired (or, inherited) before migration. About 70 per cent of aspiration differentials can be explained by factors such as young age, good education, or superior socio-economic background, while the residual seems to be linked to an individual pre-disposition for higher aspirations. However, despite the fact that migration is economically beneficial for most migrants, the migration experience itself seems to further increase economic aspirations, hereby trapping migrants on a "hedonic treadmill"

The gravity of high-skilled migration policies

Combining unique annual bilateral high-skilled immigration labor flow data for 10 OECD destinations between 2000 and 2012, with new databases comprising both unilateral and bilateral policy instruments, we present the first judicious cross-country assessment of policies aimed to attract and select high-skilled workers. Points-based systems are much more effective in attracting and selecting high-skilled migrants than requiring a job offer, labor market tests and shortage-lists. Offers of permanent residency, while attracting the highly skilled, overall reduce the human capital content of labor flows since they prove more attractive to non-high-skilled workers. Bilateral recognition of diploma and social security agreements foster greater flows of high-skilled workers and improve the skill selectivity of immigrant flows. Conversely, double taxation agreements deter high-skilled migrants, although they do not alter overall skill selectivity. Our results are robust to a variety of empirical specifications that account for destination-specific amenities, multilateral resistance to migration and the endogeneity of immigration policies

On the negative impact of time zone differences on international tourism

This research note reports novel results on the negative effect of time zone differences on international tourism in a global sample of countries over the period 1995–2013. A gravity-type model, which has become standard in international tourism demand, is estimated with Pseudo-Poisson maximum likelihood, controlling for geographical distance and other potential confounders at the dyadic level in addition to origin-year and destination-year fixed effects. The effect of time zone differences is found to be substantively strong and approximately (log-)linear across the various hours of time zone difference, with an average negative effect of about 11.6% per hour of time difference

Visa restrictions and economic globalisation

States have a general interest in facilitating the cross-border mobility of people in order to benefit from economic globalisation. Yet, mainly due to security concerns, most governments grant visa-free mobility only very selectively. Drawing on a new bilateral visa policy database covering up to 194 destination and 214 origin countries over the 1995 to 2013 period, our analysis finds that the introduction of a visa restriction by a destination country for citizens from a particular origin country deters tourism inflows by more than 20 percent. Visa restrictions also reduce bilateral trade and foreign investment, but to a smaller extent than previous studies have suggested. Exploring heterogeneity across countries, we find visa restrictions to be economically most harmful for poorer countries. We further find that some of the deterred flows in tourists, goods and services, and capital are redirected to other visa-free destination

The global mobility divide: How visa policies have evolved over time.

While visa policies are the major instrument for regulating and controlling the global flow of people, little is known about how they have changed over time. Accordingly, scholars have expressed the need for large-N datasets which cover more than one point in time. This article takes up this challenge and presents a for the first time a global overview of the changes in visa waiver policies based on a newly created database containing the visa waiver policies of over 150 countries for 1969 and 2010. We find that, on average, visa-free mobility has in-creased over the past 40 years. However, not everybody has benefited from these develop-ments. In fact, visa waivers are increasingly unequally divided: While citizens of OECD countries and rich countries have gained mobility rights, mobility rights for other regions have stagnated or even diminished, in particular for citizens from African countries. Overall, we find a clear bifurcation in mobility rights, leading to a ‘global mobility divide’