title: Refugee crises. Measurement and impact on selected European economies
Creators: name: Sharapov, Vladimir
Publisher: name: University of Glasgow
Year: 2023

description: In Part I this dissertation states and answers the following questions. What is a ’Refugee Crisis’? How might one measure it objectively? What are the characteristic features of the Refugee Crises? After examining the existing literature from various disciplines, this dissertation argues that there is an ambiguity in the understanding of the term refugee crisis. Furthermore, there is a lack of an objective, measurable description of it, significantly limiting the possibilities to quantitatively investigate refugee events and their effects on the receiving countries. This dissertation proposes a set of criteria for defining and objectively measuring the severity of a refugee event, thus generating a way to identify refugee crises in the receiving country and allowing one to compare any refugee events. In Part II this dissertation uses a set of European countries which have participated in many extensive movements of refugees in Europe since 1951 and employing a relatively new but popular among macroeconomists method of Local Projections, the dissertation then evaluates the impact of the refugee crises on the selected macroeconomic, socio-economic and political indicators of these countries. In Part III this dissertation undertakes a comprehensive examination of the existing literature on the relationship between refugees, refugee crises and terrorism, highlighting significant shortcomings in sample selection methodologies. Subsequently, it employs established methods and specifications from the literature to estimate the influence of refugees and refugee crises on terrorism within the selected countries. Furthermore, the analysis proposes enhancements to the existing specifications and assesses their validity in establishing the connections between refugees, refugee crises, and terrorism. The key empirical findings are that from the economic point of view, refugee crises can work as a short-term demand shock, increasing real GDP per capita potentially through the rise in real government consumption and significantly increasing unemployment in the receiving country. With the time it takes for refugees to integrate, the unemployment response seems to decrease, and then the positive inflation response to a refugee crisis emerges. There were no statistically significant effects found on such socio-economic indicators as the shadow economy, human capital, or the overall crime levels in the host countries. However, according to this dissertation, the percentage of votes for a right-wing political party dramatically reacts to a refugee crisis, rapidly growing over the few years after the crisis. Furthermore, another important finding of this study is that while refugee crises positively and statistically significantly contribute to terrorism in host countries, the impact of sheer numbers of refugees and asylum seekers follows a U-shaped pattern. Specifically, as the stock of refugees and asylum seekers increases, terrorism in host countries tends to decrease. However, beyond a certain threshold, the presence of an additional person from either of these categories starts to exert a positive influence on terrorism.