Akademik Veri Yönetim Sistemi
ADMINISTRATIVE, ECONOMICS AND SOCIAL SCIENCES Theory,Current Research and New Trends, Asst. Prof. Dr. Selim DEMEZ, Editör, IVPE, Cetinje, ss.252-265, 2020
According to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees
(UNHCR), the refugee; a person who has been forced to flee her or his
country because of persecution, violence or war. Refugees have a wellfounded fear of persecution for reasons of race, political opinion,
religion, nationality or belonging to a particular social group. Generally
they cannot return home or are afraid to do. Therefore, war, ethnic
problems, tribal and religious conflicts are the main reasons to refugees'
escape from their country.
As a result of the increasing conflicts and civil wars in the world,
refugee flows have increased continuously and reached approximately
13.6 million people in 2018. Refugees are mostly in the least developed
or developing countries and most of are in neighboring countries. Major
source countries of refugees are Syria (6.7 million people), Afghanistan
(2.7 million people) and South Sudan (2.3 million people), respectively
(UNHCR, 2018). The Syrian civil war caused many refugees to migrate
in recent history; this led to mass migration of Syrians to neighbor
countries such as Turkey, Lebanon, Jordan, Iranian and Iraq (Fakih and
Ibrahim, 2016). Before the civil war, Syria was top refugee-hosting
country. For example, in 2008, Syria was second refugee-hosting country
with 1.1 million Iraqi refugees in the world. The distribution of other
refugees by country is as follows: Afghan refugees in Pakistan and Iran;
Myanmar refugees in Bangladesh; Iraqi refugees in Lebanon, Jordan and
Turkey; Burundian and Congolese refugees in Tanzania, South Sudan,
Uganda and Chad; Eritrean refugees in Sudan, Vietnam and China;
Somali refugees are mostly in Kenya Refugees affect host country's economy in many ways. They increase
public spending (Alshouba, 2017), lead to widespread bribery and thus to
increase corruption (Brees, 2010) and increasing epidemic can affect
public health negatively (Atim, 2013). The most important effect of
refugees on the economy is on the labor market. Refugees directly affect
employment of local people due to working low wages in the labor
markets (Stave and Hillesund, 2015; Glonek, 2014) and reducing average
wages in the informal sector (Del Carpio and Wagner, 2015), seen as
both consumer and low-cost labor by local manufacturers (Betts et al.
2014) therefore, refugees affect the price level through cost and demand
channel (Alix-Garcia and Saah, 2009).
Refugee flows can cause countries to be dependent on international
aid. To avoid the negative impact of mass refugee flows on economic and
social life as well as on the environment and security, many of the
countries try to prevent refugee flows channels such as complicating
asylum procedures, preventing integrating into the local
community(László, 2018). This leads refugees to be dependent on the
informal sector and causes to work in low-wage jobs (Dadush and
Niebuhr, 2016).
In this study, the impact of refugees on economic growth is discussed
for 18 countries that different stage of development between period of
1994-2017. In the second part of this study, the literature will be
evaluated and the econometric method and findings will be presented in
the third and fourth parts, respectively.