EU Migrant Crisis

Trending topic at this moment is the EU migrant crisis. Politicians are currently struggling to respond to the major increase in migrants and refugees who are attempting to escape war and or poverty.

This subject has been widely covered and discussed in the media. In order to estimate the economic impact of the problem, we have attempted to estimate the costs and relate this to the GDP of each host country and the size of the population of the respective country.

According to several articles and papers listed below we estimate the annual cost per refugee is approximately between €10.000 and €30.000 per year. What is not reflected in these costs are the increase in jobs provided for to the local population who would otherwise be on social benefits. Because of the difficulty of estimating the costs, the visualization contains a field in which users can enter their own estimated costs.

Listed below are some background articles on abovementioned costs.

Germany

http://www.focus.de/politik/deutschland/800-000-fluechtlinge-erwartet-versorgung-von-asylbewerbern-wird-deutschland-10-milliarden-euro-kosten_id_4891162.html

http://www.faz.net/aktuell/wirtschaft/wirtschaftspolitik/asylbewerber-kosten-bis-zu-10-milliarden-euro-13758770.html

France

http://www.lemonde.fr/societe/article/2015/04/13/la-cour-des-comptes-s-alarme-de-la-politique-d-asile-de-la-france_4614665_3224.html

http://www.lemonde.fr/les-decodeurs/article/2015/05/06/les-demandeurs-d-asile-ont-ils-un-cout-exorbitant-pour-la-france_4628840_4355770.html

UK

http://www.cityam.com/221546/how-much-would-it-cost-uk-accept-all-asylum-seekers

Netherlands

http://www.rijksbegroting.nl/2014/voorbereiding/begroting,kst186612_12.html

http://sargasso.nl/welk-bedrag-geeft-de-staat-uit-per-asielzoeker/

https://www.rijksoverheid.nl/binaries/rijksoverheid/documenten/kamerstukken/2015/06/03/antwoorden-kamervragen-over-de-kosten-van-asielzoekers/lp-v-j-0000008304.pdf

OECD

http://www.oecd.org/dac/stats/RefugeeCostsMethodologicalNote.pdf

The visualization

This visualization shows the asylum-seekers and refugees as estimated by the UNHCR, http://popstats.unhcr.org/.  There are several options for users to interact with the data.

Type: allows the user to choose between asylum-seekers, refugees or sum total.

Select to view: allows the user to view the absolute number of costs, costs as a  % of gdp or costs per inhabitant.

Income group: enables the user to filter the host country based on income group. This can be particularly helpful when comparing costs, as refugee costs tend to be higher for high income countries than low income countries.

Date: allows the user to select a year.

Forecast: can be used to estimate the number of refugees and costs for one and two years ahead.

€ Cost per migrant: are the annual costs per migrant.

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