Undesired properties of the European Commission’s refugee distribution key

Philip Grech

European Union Politics, 2017, vol. 18, issue 2, 212-238

Abstract: The European Commission has proposed a refugee distribution key, which yields respective quotas for European Union/European Free Trade Association member states. It is based on four quantities: GDP, population, asylum applications per capita in the past, and unemployment rates. I show that the given distribution key has properties which contradict the European Commission’s intentions. Exemplarily, states with low (high) unemployment may experience a lower (higher) quota when unemployment is taken into account compared to when it is not. These deviations are single-digit percentages. As a remedy, I propose an alternative distribution key, which avoids the undesired properties. It is modeled in the spirit of the European Commission’s proposal and is based on the same four quantities. Deviations between the two distribution keys are up to two-digit percentages.

Keywords: Burden-sharing; distribution key; European Commission; refugee crisis (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2017
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/1465116516649244 (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:sae:eeupol:v:18:y:2017:i:2:p:212-238

DOI: 10.1177/1465116516649244

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in European Union Politics
Bibliographic data for series maintained by SAGE Publications ().