The Political Economy of Refugee Migration

Mathias Czaika ()
Additional contact information
Mathias Czaika: Department of International Economic Policy, University of Freiburg

No 7, Discussion Paper Series from Department of International Economic Policy, University of Freiburg

Abstract: 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.

Keywords: Refugee Movements; Asylum Policy; Foreign Aid (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 28 pages
Date: 2009-01, Revised 2009-01
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-dev, nep-mig and nep-pol
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (12)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.iep.uni-freiburg.de/discussion-papers/ ... efugee_migration.pdf (application/pdf)

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:fre:wpaper:7

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Discussion Paper Series from Department of International Economic Policy, University of Freiburg Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Günther G. Schulze ().