# **3. ANALYSIS**

Has the increase in Syrian refugees impacted the welfare and socioeconomic conditions of the host community? Summary statistics in the previous section showed clear trends of increasing poverty among recent migrants throughout the country, both near the Syrian border and across rest of the country. While the poverty rates of recent migrant households spiked in 2013, poverty of host community households maintained a relatively constant level in the whole country. From these trends, it appears that there at least has not been an increasing trend in poverty among the host community over the latest years.

The empirical model is shown in Equation 1. Regressions are estimated at the NUTS2-year level and using data from only the years 2011 and 2013. The dependent variable of interest is the host community poverty rate by region and year, where the poverty rate is based on spatially deflated imputed household income. Unlike the computation of the poverty rates, “recent migrant” information is not used for the analysis. Only the host community poverty rates are calculated using the LFS and the number of Syrians are taken from government sources. In that respect, the regression dos not suffer from the small sample size or any other limitations relating to the estimation of poverty rates for recent migrants.

The year 2013 is selected since there is available administrative information on the stock of Syrian refugees across regions. The choice of 2011 is rather arbitrary since we assume no foreign-born population in the year 2011 or before. The explanatory variable of interested is the proportion of SUTPs relative to the population (���). The assumption is that the proportion equals zero for all regions in 2011. This is a simplistic but reasonably accurate estimate since the majority of SUTPs arrive in 2012. Moreover, official estimates of the number of Syrians in Turkey were also not available until starting in 2012. Overall, in 2013, Syrians were still very concentrated in only a few regions. Out of 26 regions, Syrians comprised more than 1 percent of the population in only 7 regions. Estimations cannot be conducted at the household-level data since the survey-to-survey imputation methods used to compute poverty rates yield only group level estimates of poverty rates, not household level poverty rates.

The ideal methodology would be to measure the causal effects of the influx (shock) of Syrians under temporary protection as a proportion of the population onto the poverty rates of the host community. However, there are some concerns regarding endogeneity. The foreign-born in Turkey have freedom of movement and it is very likely that households prefer to settle in locations that are more welcoming or offer better economic opportunities. Regional differences in social and economic conditions can influence their decisions to locate. Del Carpio and Wagner (2015) discuss these concerns and propose an instrumental variable approach. Two different, but complementary IVs are proposed: distance and time from Syrian regions to Turkish regions. In this paper, regional aggregation and time dimension of the data limits the data to only 52 data points. There are not enough rank conditions and IV is not feasible.

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