Asylum Migration, Borders and Terrorism in a Structural Gravity Model

Federico Carril-Caccia, Jordi Paniagua () and Francisco Requena Silvente
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Federico Carril-Caccia: Department of Spanish and International Economics, University of Granada, Granada (Spain).

No 2108, Working Papers from Department of Applied Economics II, Universidad de Valencia

Abstract: In this paper we examine the impact of terrorism attacks on asylum-related migration flows. So far, the literature that examines the “push factors” such as terrorism explaining forced migration has omitted the fact that the vast majority of people forced to flee, tend to do it somewhere else within the country. The novel feature of our research is the estimation of a structural gravity equation that includes both international migration and internally displaced persons, a theoretically-consistent framework that allows us to identify country-specific variables like terror attacks. For that purpose, we use the information on the number of asylum applications, the number of internally displaced persons, and the number of terrorist attacks in each country for a sample of 119 origin developing countries and 141 destination countries over 2009-2018. The empirical results reveal several interesting and policy-relevant traits. Firstly, the number of forced migration abroad is still minimal compared to internally displaced persons, but globalization forces are pushing up the ratio. Secondly, terror violence has a positive and significant effect on asylum migration flows relative to the number of internally displaced persons. Thirdly, omitting internally displaced people biases downward the effect of terrorism on asylum applications. Fourthly, we observe regional heterogeneity in the effect of terrorism on asylum migration flows; in Latin America, terrorist attacks have a much larger impact on the number of asylum applications relative to internally displaced persons than in Asia or Africa.

Keywords: Asylum migration; forced migration; internally displaced persons; structural gravity; terrorism (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021-07
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-int, nep-mig and nep-ure
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (4)

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Journal Article: Asylum Migration, Borders, and Terrorism in a Structural Gravity Model (2021)
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