began in April 2011 and has been continuing at an increasing pace as the conflict in Syria expands.<sup>5</sup> The Turkish government has provided a tremendous amount of support in the form of shelter and essential items to help sustain the livelihood of large numbers of refugees. However, aid funds are not limitless and refugees face hardships that will persist over the long-term. The refugee camp population in Turkey has been stable since March of 2013 as the physical capacity of the camps have been exhausted.<sup>6</sup> This saturation has resulted in a steep increase in the number of Syrians living outside camps across Turkey. The proportion of Syrian refugees living outside camps increased from 53 percent to 87 percent between March 2013 and November 2014.<sup>7</sup> In addition, even though refugees living outside camps continue to be concentrated near the Syrian border (64 percent), the dispersion of Syrians across the country has expanded, especially in major urban centers such as Istanbul and Ankara.

The results in this paper are limited to 2013 due to changes in the 2014 LFS that make poverty estimations incomparable to previous years.<sup>8</sup> Therefore our results may provide only a partial insight into the impact of SUTPs, since the dispersion of Syrians across Turkey has increased greatly in 2014 and 2015. The descriptive characteristics of foreign-born and host community households are still comparable, and therefore allow for comparisons between 2013 and 2014. It is possible to make some inferences on welfare changes by looking at changes in host community employment rates and labor market characteristics.

Overall, this paper finds no negative effects on host community welfare from an increasing population of SUTPs. As other authors have stated, the influx of SUTPs has had both positive and negative impacts. It seems on average, the host community has been strong and adaptive, and not negatively impacted. This is not to disregard that real strains do exist in some regions where the SUTP population is very large. Nor do these results undermine findings of displacement effects in the labor market that certain types of workers are experiencing. However, on average nationally, we do not see a systematic decline in the welfare of the host community between 2011 and 2013.

The remainder of the paper is organized as follows. Section 2 outlines the data availability and technical issues. Section 3 discusses descriptive statistics of the foreign-born and host community. Section 4 explores the impact of the foreign-born population on host community welfare.

# **1. DATA AND TECHNICAL ISSUES**

## **_Data Sets_**

Data availability limits which data set can be used to identify the foreign-born population and geographic location while measuring poverty. The Turkish Statistical Institute (TUIK) has been conducting three nationally representative surveys annually since 2005; the Household Income and Consumption Expenditure Survey (HICES), the Survey on Income and Living Conditions (SILC) and the Labor Force Survey (LFS). However the HICES, which is the national survey that is used to measure official poverty,

> 5 UNCHR, 2013pg 13

> 6 UNHCR (22 November 2013), UNHCR (15 September 2014)

> 7 UNHCR (22 March 2013),  Erdogan (2014), pg 14

> 8 This technical issue will be discussed further later in the paper.

4