Workshop: Bringing economics, health and migration together: a mutual learning experiment
Authors:   Organised by: Work group ‘Economic arguments in migrant health policy making’ Chair persons: Kayvan Bozorgmehr - Germany
Published: November 2019

Acknowledging the role of economic arguments in political discourses and decision-making, researchers have begun to pay more attention to the fiscal implications of different health policy options for migrants. As yet, empirical evidence on economic effects of policy responses to migration and the societal costs or cost-effectiveness of competing strategies to address migrants’ health needs is scarce. Methodological challenges such as limited availability and accessibility of decent data often impede the generation of robust evidence. Further, little is known as to how evidence can effectively be moved into policy; e.g., the actual clout of economic arguments in migration policies debates, as opposed to other evidence- or value-based arguments, hitherto remains unclear.

In other social policy domains such as educational and labour market integration, economic evaluations have become routine components of policy assessments. And under the title of, e.g., knowledge translation, strategies for the introduction of research evidence into political decision-making processes have been developed. The combination of similar goals and challenges suggests that there are opportunities to build bridges across sectors and disciplines - e.g., public health, social epidemiology, economics, social policy, data science - as well as across research-practice-divides, for the purposes of mutual learning and the joint improvement of research outcomes.

The goal of this workshop is to start such learning processes by bringing together researchers and professionals from different fields, by sharing existing knowledge, and by jointly exploring the following questions: What are the thematic intersections, tensions and synergies between the different disciplines? What are common goals and questions? Which kinds of different knowledge complement each other towards those goals?Where are options for mutual learning, methodological transfer and/or synthesis? How can they help to overcome current challenges in estimating the costs of divergent migrant health policies?What can be learnt from existing knowledge translation strategies as regards the role of research for migrant health policy making?What challenges and open questions remain?

The workshop will start with a brief introduction of key concepts and objectives. The first presentation will use three case studies to reflect on the potential of economic evaluation for improving health screening and assessment policies for asylum seekers in Germany. The second presentation will provide input from seminal research on public policy in migration contexts. A third presentation will summarize previous activities and insights of the work group “Economic arguments in migrant health policy making”. The following discussion will examine the above noted questions by tapping into the presenters’ expertise and the audience’s experience. The workshop will be closed with a summary of lessons learnt and directions for future research.

Key messages

Economic arguments play a central role in policy-making; but economic analyses of different migrant health policy options are hampered by various methodological challenges and tensions. Seminal research in other social policy domains offers potential for mutual learning, toward the end of generating valid economic evidence on the cost-benefits of migrants’ greater in-/exclusion.