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

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’

Migration as cause and consequence of aspirations

This paper aims to disentangle the relationship between aspirations and migration by analysing why Indonesian internal migrants generally have higher aspirations when compared with non-migrants. We ask whether migrants have higher aspirations for improving their economic well-being, and whether this ‘capacity to aspire’ already existed before migration or is rather the result of the migration experience itself. Based on longitudinal information from three waves of the Indonesian Family and Life Survey (IFLS) between 1997 and 2007, we find robust evidence for migrants having higher individual aspirations than non-migrants already before they choose to migrate. About 70 per cent of the aspiration differential between future migrants and non-migrants can be explained by factors such as young age, education, or socio-economic background, which also affect the ‘capacity to realise’ migration; the residual, however, is due to a personal trait, i.e. a certain disposition to have higher aspirations. Beyond these systematic pre-migration differences in aspirations, we find that despite the fact that migration is economically beneficial for most migrants, migration further spurs aspiration gaps

Migration in times of uncertainty: on the role of economic prospects: DEMIG project paper no. 11

Uncertainty and risk perceptions are important elements in the decision-making process about migration. This study outlines a ‘migration prospect theory’, i.e. an application and advancement of Kahneman and Tversky’s (1979; Tversky and Kahneman 1991) original prospect theory, which aims to explain short-term fluctuations of migration flows as a consequence of expectation-based adjustment about future economic prospects. I argue that individuals with migration intentions continuously assess general economic prospects, including the labour market situation, at home and abroad in order to form reference points and updates for their migration-related expectations. Consequently, deviations from reference points generate (short-term) expectation-based utility gains or losses for potential migrants, which affect the value of the migration option. This can lead to a cancellation or procrastination of the individual migration project. Based on an analysis of annual and quarterly intra-European migration inflows to Germany between 2001 and 2010, supportive empirical evidence about some key implications of this migration prospect theory is found: first, migration flows respond more strongly to negative than to equal-sized positive economic prospects, indicating loss aversion of potential migrants; second, expectation-based prospects about the future economic situation in the home and in the potential destination country can counterbalance or enforce structural economic incentives based on real economic aggregates; and third, migration flows show a diminishing sensitivity for larger fluctuations in expectation-based adjustments of economic prospects

The political economy of refugee migration and foreign aid

This book inquires the determinants of forced migration, describes the distribution of burdens from forced migration across countries, and analyzes the strategic interaction of national refugee policies to control refugee flows. Emphasis is put on the role of asymmetries between countries with respect to their preferences regarding immigrants, the costs incurred by immigrants, their stage of development and especially their geographical position as neighboring first asylum country or Western asylum country. Special attention is given to one policy instrument to control refugee migration flows, namely foreign aid. The book attempts to answer questions such as: What are the driving factors of forced migration movements? How can refugee burdens be assessed and compared across different types of host countries? Who are the actors in international refugee protection and management, and how do they act? And finally, how does the phenomenon of international refugee movements, and specifically how do asylum seekers, influence the aid allocation politics of Western industrialized countries?</p