The Impact of Forced Displacement on Host Communities : A Review of the Empirical Literature in Economics

Verme, Paolo ; Schuettler, Kirsten

World Bank, Washington, DC

关键词: REFUGEES;    DISPLACED PERSONS;    MIGRATION;    RETURNEES;    EXPELLEES;   

DOI  :  10.1596/1813-9450-8727
RP-ID  :  WPS8727

学科分类：社会科学、人文和艺术（综合）

来源: World Bank Open Knowledge Repository

【 摘 要 】

The paper reviews 49 empirical studiesthat estimate the impact of forced displacement on hostcommunities. A review of the empirical models used by thesestudies and a meta-analysis of 762 separate resultscollected from them are the main contributions of the paper.Coverage extends to 17 major forced displacement crises thatoccurred between 1922 and 2015, to host countries atdifferent levels of economic development and different typesof forced migrants. The focus is on outcomes related tohousehold well-being, prices, employment, and wages. Allstudies can be classified as ex post quasi-naturalexperiments. The analysis on empirical modeling shows apreference for partial equilibrium modeling,differences-in-differences evaluation methods, andcross-section econometrics, with all these choices largelydependent on the type of data available. The meta-analysison household well-being shows that between 45 and 52 percentof the results are positive and significant, indicating anet improvement in household well-being. An additional 34 to42 percent of the results are found to be nonsignificant,and 6 to 20 percent show a decrease in household well-being.The analyses on employment and wages show positive andsignificant improvements for 12 to 20 percent of theresults, nonsignificant results in 63 percent of the cases,and negative and significant results for 22 to 25 percent ofthe results. Negative results on employment and wages relateto young and informal workers in middle-income countries.The results on prices show asymmetric behavior across typesof products. Overall, the probability of having a negativeoutcome for host communities in the consumer and labormarkets is below 20 percent.