Asylum seekers are not a "burden" for European economies

Does the arrival of asylum seekers lead to a deterioration in the economic performance and public finances of the European countries that host them? The answer is no, according to economists from the CNRS, Clermont-Auvergne University, and Paris-Nanterre University,¹ who have estimated a dynamic statistical model based on thirty years of data from fifteen countries in Western Europe. On the contrary, the economic impact tends to be positive as a proportion of the asylum seekers become permanent residents. This study is published in Science Advances on June 20, 2018. Over a million people claimed asylum in one of the European Union countries in 2015, making it a record year. What is the economic and fiscal impact of these migration flows' This study is not the first to consider this question,² but the method it uses is new. Traditional approaches mainly adopt an accountancy approach: they compare the taxes paid by the immigrants with the public transfers paid to them, but do not take into account the economic interactions.³ The researchers used a statistical model introduced by Christopher Sims, who in 2011 was awarded the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel. Widely used to evaluate the effects of economic policies, this model lets the statistical data speak for themselves by imposing very few assumptions.