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on Economics of Human Migration |
| By: | Michel Beine; Luisito Bertinelli; Rana Comertpay; Anastasia Litina; Jean-Francois Maystadt |
| Abstract: | Based on geolocalized mobile phone calls data, we study the mobility of refugees in Turkey. We employ a gravity model to estimate the determinants of refugee movements across 26 regions in 2017. To benchmark our findings, we estimate the same model for the mobility of individuals with a non-refugee status. Beyond the standard determinants such as the levels of income at origin, at destination and distances across regions, we find that networks, provision of humanitarian aid and asylum grants are important determinants of refugee mobility. Our paper deepens our understanding on how forcibly displaced people may respond to economic, social and political factors in their location decision. |
| Keywords: | Refugee Mobility, Gravity Model of Migration, Forced Displacement, Mobile Phone Data, News Media, Poisson Pseudo-Maximum Likelihood |
| JEL: | J6 |
| Date: | 2020 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:lan:wpaper:293574571&r=all |
| By: | Devictor,Xavier; Do,Quy-Toan; Levchenko,Andrei A. |
| Abstract: | This paper analyzes the spatial distribution of refugees over 1987-2017 and establishes several stylized facts about refugees today compared with past decades. (i) Refugees today travel longer distances. (ii) Refugees today are less likely to seek protection in a neighboring country. (iii) Refugees today are less geographically concentrated. And (iv) refugees today are more likely to reside in a high-income OECD country. The findings bring new evidence to the debate on refugee burden-sharing. |
| Date: | 2020–04–07 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:wbk:wbrwps:9206&r=all |
| By: | Chigumi Kawaguchi |
| Abstract: | Abstract Gender-Based Violence (GBV) has been recognized as a significant challenge among communities forcibly displaced by armed conflict, such as those living in refugee camps. Since the adoption of United Nations Security Council Resolution 1325, significant progress has been made by the international community and UN member countries in responding to GBV. However, providing support only to those who positively seek help is insufficient, and there is a need to develop more effective ways to extend support to those who face such difficulties, as well as prevent future incidents of GBV from occurring. This paper identifies help-seeking pathways in order to overcome the barriers to securing help in refugee communities. First, the paper develops a model of help-seeking based on an adapted version of the ecological model to understand help-seeking. Second, the model is appraised in relation to the data gathered from twelve focus group discussions (FGDs) with South Sudanese refugees in six refugee settlement areas in Uganda. The paper identifies the factors underpinning GBV and help-seeking, help-seeking pathways, and barriers to help-seeking. GBV survivors often decide not to avail themselves of any help or support services, mainly due to fear of stigma resulting from socio-cultural norms and low expectations of services. The help-seeking pathway reveals that the community leaders or churches are the primary and most familiar institutions with which to seek support, rather than through support by humanitarian agencies or the host community. The conclusion contributes recommendations toward the development of a modified help-seeking model for GBV survivors and services, specifically in conflict-affected refugee conditions. |
| Keywords: | South Sudan, Uganda, refugees, gender-based violence (GBV), help-seeking |
| Date: | 2020–04 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:jic:wpaper:210&r=all |
| By: | Yuko Tobinai |
| Abstract: | Abstract The aim of this paper is to show part of the actual situation in refugee settlements in Uganda. In particular, the paper focuses on the Kuku, an ethnic group of South Sudan and the gender-based violence (GBV) program in the refugee settlements. Scholars have conducted research on gender and GBV in South Sudan and in refugee settlements. Various studies have demonstrated that changing people’s understanding of gender or their gender situation in the context of the lives of refugees. However, previous works have shown the strong effect of aid on refugees and have described aid workers as monolithic. This paper attempts to describe the variety of people who make up a refugee settlement. It then looks at how this variety affects the relationship between aid and refugees, and the way that refugees view both gender and GBV.The main field site for this study, Adjumani, is situated in Uganda near the border with South Sudan. As of August 2017, it had 18 refugee settlements. NGO staff are based in each settlement, and NGOs have contracted refugees as incentive workers. Incentive workers are intermediaries between refugees and staff. Various kinds of relationships between staff, incentive workers, and refugees have developed within the settlements. These relationships have made the refugee/staff boundaries ambiguous and have influenced the understanding of gender and GBV among refugees. However, refugees also have their own social space that is inaccessible to aid workers |
| Keywords: | gender, gender-based violence (GBV), South Sudan, Uganda, aid, refugees, Kukus |
| Date: | 2020–03 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:jic:wpaper:205&r=all |
| By: | Andreas Ferrara; Price V. Fishback |
| Abstract: | Are the costs of discrimination mainly borne by the targeted group or by society? This paper examines both individual and aggregate costs of ethnic discrimination. Studying Germans living in the U.S. during World War I, an event that abruptly downgraded their previously high social standing, we propose a novel measure of local anti-German sentiment based on war casualties. We show that Germans disproportionally fled counties with high casualty rates and that those counties saw more anti-German slurs reported in newspapers. German movers had worse occupational outcomes after the war but also the discriminating communities paid a substantial cost. Counties with larger outflows of Germans, who pre-war tended to be well-trained manufacturing workers, saw a drop in average annual manufacturing wages of 1-7% which persisted until 1940. Thus, for discriminating communities, a few years of intense anti-German sentiment were reflected in worse economic outcomes that lasted for more than a decade. |
| JEL: | J15 J61 J71 N32 N42 |
| Date: | 2020–04 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:nbr:nberwo:26936&r=all |
| By: | IGARASHI Akira; ONO Yoshikuni |
| Abstract: | The literature on immigration has emphasized the close connection between potential threats posed by immigrants and the development of anti-immigrant sentiment among natives. Yet, immigrants also benefit the host society, and we know little about the effects of perceived benefits on attitudes toward immigration. By conducting a vignette survey experiment, we explore how exposure to negative and positive information about immigrants shapes people's attitudes toward immigration. Our results show that feelings of hostility toward immigrants are reduced in respondents when they are exposed to positive information, while the exposure to negative information does not necessarily change their attitude. Interestingly, these results are equally observed across four major issue domains discussed in existing studies—jobs, financial burden, culture, and physical safety. Furthermore, the effects of exposure to positive information are not modified by partisanship, race, education, or exposure to immigrants. These results suggest that pro-immigrant rhetoric can be effective in changing people's attitudes toward immigration. |
| Date: | 2020–03 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:eti:dpaper:20023&r=all |
| By: | HAGIWARA Risa; LIU Yang |
| Abstract: | This study examines the assimilation of immigrant children in Japan in terms of high school enrollment using the 2010 Population Census from the Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications (MIC). Immigrant children are defined as children who have at least one foreign-born parent in this study. We examine the gap between native and immigrant children with similar characteristics using nonlinear decomposition. We find that the average school attendance probability of immigrant children is significantly lower than that of native children. Immigrant children with one parent who is a foreigner show a large difference. Factors that enlarge the gap are shorter length of stay in Japan, parents' lack of use of Chinese characters in their country of birth, parents' lower level of regular employment status, and lack of home ownership. The most important factor above in explaining the gap is parental background in terms of use of Chinese characters. The total explained part of all observable factors is about 90% in the comparison between native and immigrant children whose parents are both foreigners. Furthermore, immigrant children who have not attended high school are more likely to be unemployed. |
| Date: | 2020–03 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:eti:dpaper:20016&r=all |
| By: | Alvin Ang (Department of Economics, Ateneo de Manila University); Jeremaiah Opiniano (Institute for Migration and Development Issues) |
| Abstract: | Billion-dollar remittances from an estimated 10.3 million Filipinos in over-200 countries and territories will be a major economic lifeline for the Philippines, given today’s global pandemic due to SARS-CoV-2 and COVID-19. However, the new coronavirus and the resultant area quarantines and lockdowns are already as globally dispersed as the overseas Filipino population. Countries are now rolling out economic stimulus packages for citizens and critical economic sectors. Foreign workers like Filipinos will be affected by these economic disruptions. Add the prevailing drop of global oil prices and the looming global recession to these ongoing woes facing countries and the Philippine economy’s reliance on remittances. This paper projects two short-term trends that will affect Filipino overseas work and dollar remittances. One, cash remittances will visibly decline —from US$30 billion in 2019 to about US$ 24-to-27 billion this year (that being the steepest year-on-year decline of remittances in Philippine migration history). And two, about 300,000 to 400,000 overseas Filipino workers will be affected by lay-offs and salary cuts worldwide. The Philippines is the world’s most organized migration bureaucracy among migrant-origin countries. However, the COVID-19 pandemic may well be the most challenging crisis facing the responsive migration management system of the Philippines. |
| Keywords: | Overseas Filipinos, remittances, pandemic, COVID-19, The Philippines, recession |
| JEL: | E20 F01 F22 F24 F62 F66 |
| Date: | 2020–04 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:agy:dpaper:202005&r=all |
| By: | CHIVU, LUMINITA (National Institute of Economic Research - Romanian Academy); GEORGESCU , GEORGE (National Institute of Economic Research - Romanian Academy); BRATILOVEANU, ALINA ("Valahia" University of Targoviste); BÄ‚NCESCU, IRINA (National Institute of Economic Research - Romanian Academy) |
| Abstract: | In recent years, the labour market in Romania became more and more tense, with growing labour shortages affecting the development of many important sectors. This paper is focusing on the labour market imbalances, specifying the main landmarks of labour shortages and highlighting their conditions of emergence and the generating factors for each type of their manifestation. Even if some imbalances has been reported long before, the existence and persistence of quantitative and qualitative labour shortages in Romania became obvious only recently, also under the circumstances of the warning signals of academia and business environment. Among the causes of this growing labour shortages and mismatches are the unfavourable demographic trends, the massive external migration of the skilled and high skilled labour force, the low level of the participation rate, the high inactivity rate, the quantitative and qualitative discrepancies between the supply of the education system and the real needs of the labour market, the size of undeclared work that continues to distort the labour market, the lack of cooperation between employers and institutions with responsibilities in the field employment and professional training of adults. The case study conducted on the IT&C sector, a growing sector in Romania, led to the conclusion that, despite its was claimed by the decision makers as strategic priority, the labour shortages in the sector remains high, being likely to maintain in the near future in the absence of promoting adequate support measures. Under the circumstances of Coronavirus global outbreak early 2020, the effects on the labour market in Romania are difficult to predict, the quantitative and qualitative shortages alleviation depending on the ability of the authorities to manage the crisis and to find the right responses, including by redirecting the returned migrant workers towards the domestic labour market. |
| Keywords: | demographic demographic trends, population aging, emigration, demographic and economic dependency ratio, labour market demand and supply, labour market tensions, internal mobility, labour shortages |
| JEL: | E60 F22 F66 I20 J08 J10 J21 J23 J61 |
| Date: | 2020–03 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:ror:wpince:200325&r=all |
| By: | Hanming Fang; Long Wang; Yang Yang |
| Abstract: | We quantify the causal impact of human mobility restrictions, particularly the lockdown of the city of Wuhan on January 23, 2020, on the containment and delay of the spread of the Novel Coronavirus (2019-nCoV). We employ a set of difference-in-differences (DID) estimations to disentangle the lockdown effect on human mobility reductions from other confounding effects including panic effect, virus effect, and the Spring Festival effect. We find that the lockdown of Wuhan reduced inflow into Wuhan by 76.64%, outflows from Wuhan by 56.35%, and within-Wuhan movements by 54.15%. We also estimate the dynamic effects of up to 22 lagged population inflows from Wuhan and other Hubei cities, the epicenter of the 2019-nCoV outbreak, on the destination cities' new infection cases. We find, using simulations with these estimates, that the lockdown of the city of Wuhan on January 23, 2020 contributed significantly to reducing the total infection cases outside of Wuhan, even with the social distancing measures later imposed by other cities. We find that the COVID-19 cases would be 64.81% higher in the 347 Chinese cities outside Hubei province, and 52.64% higher in the 16 non-Wuhan cities inside Hubei, in the counterfactual world in which the city of Wuhan were not locked down from January 23, 2020. We also find that there were substantial undocumented infection cases in the early days of the 2019-nCoV outbreak in Wuhan and other cities of Hubei province, but over time, the gap between the officially reported cases and our estimated “actual” cases narrows significantly. We also find evidence that enhanced social distancing policies in the 63 Chinese cities outside Hubei province are effective in reducing the impact of population inflows from the epicenter cities in Hubei province on the spread of 2019-nCoV virus in the destination cities elsewhere. |
| JEL: | I10 I18 |
| Date: | 2020–03 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:nbr:nberwo:26906&r=all |