Policy Brief
Poverty, International Migration and Asylum
This WIDER Policy Brief examins issues such as liberalizing migration policies; protecting refugees in regions of origin; addressing the root causes of migration and refugee flows; influencing perceptions of the costs and benefits of migration; and...
Blog
A WIDER perspective on migration
While many WIDER Development Conferences emerge from ongoing projects, our latest conference in October — ‘Migration and mobility: New frontiers for...
Working Paper
Is the education of local children influenced by living nearby a refugee camp?
This paper studies to what extent and in what ways access to educational services and schooling outcomes of local children are influenced by the presence of a refugee camp in or around their community. Taking the case of Congolese refugees in Rwanda...
Working Paper
Involuntary migration, context of reception, and social mobility
In this study, we examine the Vietnamese population of the United States as a case study in the integration of a refugee group in a host country. We approach this case in three parts. We first offer a brief review of Vietnamese refugee resettlement...
Working Paper
Invisible, successful, and divided
Until the 1970s, only 1000 Vietnamese lived in West and East Germany, most of them international students. West Germany, in particular, had not yet been confronted with non-European refugees. This changed after 1978 with the influx of around 35,000...
Blog
Leading economists agree: closing borders is not the answer to inequality
by
Ashwini Deshpande
February 2017
US President Donald Trump wants to build a wall along the US-Mexican border. Britain wants to retreat into its shell to become an isolated island...
Blog
An economist’s view on migration and refugees
by
Sinikka Parviainen,
Finn Tarp
September 2016
Few issues have been so contentious in recent years as international migration. The refugee crisis sparked not least by the Syrian war has shown that...
Blog
How should the international community respond to migration and refugees?
by
Finn Tarp, Sinikka Parviainen
September 2016
In our previous blog, we looked at some of the key facts about international migration and identified a few areas that, from an economist’s...
Blog
Voices from the ground – protracted displacement economies
by
Sunit Bagree
June 2023
Many displaced people around the world are in limbo—unable to return home or go anywhere else. Our surveys show that displaced people have lived in...
Blog
Four global problems that will be aggravated by the UK’s recent cuts to international aid
UK economic forecasts have improved markedly since the September 2022 mini-budget. The economic recession may now be more shallow and public borrowing...
Working Paper
Forced migration, aid effectiveness, and the humanitarian–development nexus
Bridging the gap between humanitarian assistance and development cooperation has been a contentious issue in academia and development practice for decades. Drawing on an evaluation of Germany’s ‘Partnership for Prospects’ initiative, this paper...
Blog
Unaccompanied asylum-seeking youth in the UK – an interview with an expert: Inequalities in access to education
I recently spoke to Catherine Gladwell, who is the Director and Founder of Refugee Education UK (formerly Refugee Support Network) and one of the...
Working Paper
Securitized reception: revisiting contexts confronting Afghan and Vietnamese forced migrants
In a 2017 UNU-WIDER project, ‘Forced migration and inequality’, one of us collaborated on a comparison of Afghan and Vietnamese refugee resettlement across four Western countries. In the light of the Taliban return to power in August 2021, we revisit...
Blog
Seeking asylum from nowhere— how origin shapes the context of reception
by
Sarah Dean, Phi Hong Su
May 2022
Afghanistan is the world’s newest nowhere, a predicament that will shape the evacuation and resettlement prospects for millions of people for the...