The economic effects of migration movements from Syria to Middle East: Evidence from Host Countries

From the beginning of the Syrian civil war in 2011, an intense migration wave started from Syria to the Middle East. As a result, there have been some influences on the host countries where Syrian refugees are located. This paper aims to investigate the economic impacts of refugee movements on Turkey, Jordan, Lebanon, Iraq, and Egypt, which most immigration from Syria, for the period from 2012 to 2019. For this purpose, the macroeconomic effects of Syrian refugees on these countries’ economies are tested by using the Autoregressive Distributed-Lag (ARDL) method, applying both time series for each country and panel data analysis for the five countries. The findings imply that refugees have a positive and statistically significant effect on GDP in both Egypt and Turkey, while its effect is negative on inflation in Jordan and Lebanon. Also, refugee population leads to increase in unemployment in Egypt. Panel analysis result suggest that refugees increase economic growth in short run and decrease inflation rate in the long run.