Impacts of Syrians under temporary protection on local development in Türkiye

Abstract

Migration has become a major concern for policymakers and researchers since the 2000s, as the number of migrants has been steadily increasing, impacting people in socio-economic ways. The consequences and effects of migration are not limited to the migrants themselves; they also affect those who remain in the migrants' home areas and the residents of more developed countries where the migrants resettle. In the last decade, Turkey has been significantly affected by forced migration, particularly due to its support for Syrians displaced by the Civil War. This research explores how Turkey's local development has been influenced by these refugees. To do so, this study employs a causal identification strategy comparing Development Index scores in provinces hosting higher share of refugees with other provinces before and after 2012, when Syrian refugee influx towards Turkey has started. As local development levels of provinces in both within and across regions of Turkey are distinct from each other, we used alternative ways to construct our counterfactual group of provinces. Therefore, in addition to staggered synthetic difference-in-differences we also used difference-in-differences and synthetic control method to check the robustness of our findings. To analyze the effects and data, the Synthetic Difference in Differences method is employed. The purpose of this study is to demonstrate how local development, proxied by human development and gender development, is affected by migration. Additionally, this work implicitly examines the impact of migration on other socio-economic parameters, such as GDP per capita and life expectancy, which are included in the calculation of Human Development Index (HDI). The study also compares other indexes, including the Gender Inequality Index (GII), the Gender Development Index (GDI), and the Inequality-adjusted Human Development Index (IHDI), which measure gender and general inequality points. The results indicate that migrants have positively contributed to the local development, proxied by indices of GDI, GII, and HDI, except for the IHDI. These findings suggest that migrants have had a socio-economic contribution to Turkey between 2009 and 2018. Although Turkey's situation is unique due to the rapid increase in migrants and its provinces' diverse geographical and social characteristics, this thesis can contribute to the literature on whether refugees positively affect local development in destination countries.