# 4.2 Results

This section discusses the overall results of the four outcomes reviewed by the study using the database of 762 results. Table 7 provides the full results for the four outcomes classified into positive, non-significant and negative values where positive and negative values are intended as significant. Figure 3 provides an overview of the share of these results by outcome. Table 8 provides the results of the multivariate logit regressions where the dependent variables are dummies for negative and positive significant values and the independent variables are population characteristics. Table 9 provides the same results for the bivariate regressions with the addition of a number of dummies including: the time lag between shock and evaluation, the average share of refugees over the host population for the period considered, dummies for HICs, MICs and LICs and each of the crisis studied.<sup>17</sup> All regressions results in Tables 8 and 9 include weighted and unweighted results where weights are the journals’ impact factors. Results in Tables 8 and 9 are presented for employment and wages only. That is because these are the only two outcomes with sufficient number of observations to run the regressions as the literature rarely provides results by population groups for wellbeing and prices. Below we comment on all results by outcome.

For readers interested in selected forced displacement crises, Annex 2 provides a full discussion of results by crisis. The overview of results organized by crisis and income level of the host countries is useful in as far as this is the most defining feature that could explain differences across results. In particular, the level of economic development of host countries, the absolute and relative scale of the crises and the timing of the inflow are very important factors in determining outcomes.

## 4.2.1 Well‐being and Prices

_Well-being_ . Among all the papers reviewed, 13 papers explicitly measure the impact of displacement on the economic well-being of host communities for a total of 64 distinct results. Of these, 34 are on income, consumption or output, 20 are on housing or assets, 6 are on night luminosity and 4 are on poverty. Only two of these results are on HICs, 26 are on MICs and 36 on LICs. In all these cases, a positive result is considered a good outcome.<sup>18</sup> Table 7 shows that between 45 and 52% of results are positive and significant depending on whether results are weighted for the journals’ impact factor or not. This indicates a net improvement in household wellbeing according to about half of results. An additional, 34-42% of results are non-significant, and the remaining 6-20% of results are negative and significant. Looking more in details at the 13 negative results, these are equally split between income and consumption and assets and housing indicators. Results on assets and housing indicators refer to individual items such as construction materials of dwellings and are therefore less representative of household well-being as compared to aggregate income or expenditure.

Overall, between 80 and 94% of results are either positive or non-significant indicating that the likelihood of a forced displacement shock resulting in a negative outcome for host communities is less than 20%. The basic theory illustrated at the outset of the paper could not predict these outcomes whereas such outcomes are clearly in contrast with the popular view that forced displacement is detrimental to host communities. These results are encouraging but much more research on household well-being is needed. Future research will need to provide more hard evidence based on income, consumption or expenditure indicators and expand its coverage to many more countries and situations and possibly disaggregating results by type of households.

> 17 These dummies could not be used in the multivariate analysis because of collinearity with other variables.

> 18 Note that when poverty was used as an indicator of well-being, the sign of the coefficient was reversed to make it consistent with the other indicators of well-being where a positive sign indicates an improvement in well-being.

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