Forced Migration and Development

2026-07-22

The recent forced migration crisis has reached an impressive magnitude: by 2016, 68.5 million individuals had been forcibly displaced by violence, conflict and natural disasters. This crisis is vastly concentrated in developing countries, which host 85% of the world’s displaced population. Nevertheless, we still know relatively little about the economic consequences of forced migration in these countries. FORCEDMIGDEV seeks to fill this gap. It is organised in complementary parts that analyse the two dimensions of forced migration – internal displacement and international migration (refugees) – which constitute very different economic phenomena. The first part develops a structural model to analyse the long-run impacts of refugee inflows in developing countries. The model is estimated and used to investigate the effects of the Syrian refugees in Turkey, the largest host country in the world. I am able to answer questions that are relevant for developing but also developed host countries. What are the distributional effects of refugee shocks? What are the welfare effects across regions? What are the effects of providing refugees with a legal status? The second part combines reduced-form and structural methods to investigate the effects of severe climate shocks on internal displacement and its impacts on economic development. I take advantage of unique data availability in Brazil to estimate the reduced-form effects of internal displacement on a broad array of outcomes at destination. I then move to develop a novel quantitative spatial model that captures the equilibrium effects in origin and destination regions, while accounting for congestion and agglomeration externalities and labour market frictions. I estimate the model and use it to assess the long-run, micro and macro effects of internal displacement in Brazil. This part lies on the under-explored intersection of climate and development economics, which has a large potential to open new avenues for future research.

United Kingdom (UK)

2026-02-01