ADMINISTRATIVE, ECONOMICS AND SOCIAL SCIENCES Theory,Current Research and New Trends

Abstract

According to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), the refugee; a person who has been forced to flee her or his country because of persecution, violence or war. Refugees have a wellfounded fear of persecution for reasons of race, political opinion, religion, nationality or belonging to a particular social group. Generally they cannot return home or are afraid to do. Therefore, war, ethnic problems, tribal and religious conflicts are the main reasons to refugees' escape from their country. As a result of the increasing conflicts and civil wars in the world, refugee flows have increased continuously and reached approximately 13.6 million people in 2018. Refugees are mostly in the least developed or developing countries and most of are in neighboring countries. Major source countries of refugees are Syria (6.7 million people), Afghanistan (2.7 million people) and South Sudan (2.3 million people), respectively (UNHCR, 2018). The Syrian civil war caused many refugees to migrate in recent history; this led to mass migration of Syrians to neighbor countries such as Turkey, Lebanon, Jordan, Iranian and Iraq (Fakih and Ibrahim, 2016). Before the civil war, Syria was top refugee-hosting country. For example, in 2008, Syria was second refugee-hosting country with 1.1 million Iraqi refugees in the world. The distribution of other refugees by country is as follows: Afghan refugees in Pakistan and Iran; Myanmar refugees in Bangladesh; Iraqi refugees in Lebanon, Jordan and Turkey; Burundian and Congolese refugees in Tanzania, South Sudan, Uganda and Chad; Eritrean refugees in Sudan, Vietnam and China; Somali refugees are mostly in KenyaRefugees affect host country's economy in many ways. They increase public spending (Alshouba, 2017), lead to widespread bribery and thus to increase corruption (Brees, 2010) and increasing epidemic can affect public health negatively (Atim, 2013). The most important effect of refugees on the economy is on the labor market. Refugees directly affect employment of local people due to working low wages in the labor markets (Stave and Hillesund, 2015; Glonek, 2014) and reducing average wages in the informal sector (Del Carpio and Wagner, 2015), seen as both consumer and low-cost labor by local manufacturers (Betts et al. 2014) therefore, refugees affect the price level through cost and demand channel (Alix-Garcia and Saah, 2009). Refugee flows can cause countries to be dependent on international aid. To avoid the negative impact of mass refugee flows on economic and social life as well as on the environment and security, many of the countries try to prevent refugee flows channels such as complicating asylum procedures, preventing integrating into the local community(László, 2018). This leads refugees to be dependent on the informal sector and causes to work in low-wage jobs (Dadush and Niebuhr, 2016). In this study, the impact of refugees on economic growth is discussed for 18 countries that different stage of development between period of 1994-2017. In the second part of this study, the literature will be evaluated and the econometric method and findings will be presented in the third and fourth parts, respectively.