Foreign aid, bilateral asylum immigration and development

Abstract

Standard-Nutzungsbedingungen:Die Dokumente auf EconStor dürfen zu eigenen wissenschaftlichen Zwecken und zum Privatgebrauch gespeichert und kopiert werden.Sie dürfen die Dokumente nicht für öffentliche oder kommerzielle Zwecke vervielfältigen, öffentlich ausstellen, öffentlich zugänglich machen, vertreiben oder anderweitig nutzen.Sofern die Verfasser die Dokumente unter Open-Content-Lizenzen (insbesondere CC-Lizenzen) zur Verfügung gestellt haben sollten, gelten abweichend von diesen Nutzungsbedingungen die in der dort genannten Lizenz gewährten Nutzungsrechte.Abstract. This paper measures the links between aid from 14 rich to 113 developing economies and bilateral asylum applications during years 1993 to 2013. Dynamic panel models and Sys-GMM are used. Results show that asylum applications are related to aid nonlinearly in the level of development of origin countries, in a U-shaped fashion, where only the downward segment proves to be robust to all specifications. Asylum inflows from poor countries are negatively, significantly and robustly associated with aid in the short run, with mixed evidence of more lasting effects, while inflows from less poor economies show a positive but weak relation with aid. Moreover, aid leads to negative cross-donor spillovers. Applications linearly decrease with humanitarian aid. Voluntary immigration is not linked to aid. Overall, the reduction in asylum inflows is stronger when aid disbursements are conditional on economic, institutional and political improvements in the recipient economy.JEL Classification: F35, F22, J15

Development aid and international migration to Italy: Does aid reduce irregular flows?

“…While most other literature recognises the endogeneity of bilateral aid (e.g. Berthélemy et al, 2009;Lanati & Thiele, 2018;Menard & Gary, 2018;Murat, 2020), it is surprisingly rare for other aid to be considered as such. Because Italy is a main gateway to other European destinations, other donors are likely to be influenced by the migrant outflows from a country when allocating their aid.…”

“…Because Italy is a main gateway to other European destinations, other donors are likely to be influenced by the migrant outflows from a country when allocating their aid. Murat (2020) takes an alternative approach to tackling endogeneity by employing a system GMM model. If the instruments are valid, this is able to provide unbiased estimates of the relationship of interest.…”

“…As Roodman (2009, p.142) points out, even p-values of 0.25 'should be viewed with concern'. In Murat's (2020) core estimates (Table 1), p-values range from .068 to .198. Of the twenty results in the body of the paper, nine reject the null of correctly identified instruments at the 10%…”

“…When disaggregating aid into different types, humanitarian aid is reportedly more effective in reducing refugee flows in the short run: aid reduces refugee outflows as long as the share of humanitarian aid exceeds 9% of total ODA receipts. Murat (2020) is another recent paper that moves away from a focus on regular migration. Using data on the flows of asylum seekers to many OECD destinations between 1993 and 2013, she estimates the effects of bilateral aid and its interaction with sending country's GDP.…”

“…Dreher et al's (2019) approach is to use a dependent variable that is problematic (as discussed in Section 3; the measure is constructed from stocks which are influenced by many factors such as historical migration and changes in immigration status) but has wide coverage: they sum all migrants with asylum status across all destination countries. This multi-destination approach is also taken by Murat (2020). We argue that our dependent variable more accurately captures the stated aim of donors (reducing flows of irregular migrants), but for a single gateway European country.…”