Do refugee camps help or hurt hosts? The case of Kakuma, Kenya
By Jennifer Alix-García, S. Walker, Anne L. Bartlett, Harun Onder, A. Sanghi. 2018
159 citations recorded by the source corpus.
We combine nighttime lights data, official statistics, and new household survey data from northern Kenya in order to assess the impact of long-term refugee camps on host populations. The nighttime lights estimates show that refugee inflows increase economic activity in areas very close to Kakuma refugee camp: the elasticity of the luminosity index to refugee population is 0.36 within a 10 km distance from the camp center. In addition, household consumption within the same proximity to the camp is 25% higher than in areas farther away. Price, household survey, and official statistics suggest that the mechanisms driving this positive effect are increased availability of new employment and price changes in agricultural and livestock markets that are favorable to local producers.
Subfields: Global and Planetary Change, Sociology and Political Science, Transportation
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/1cae84ba55e8972143bc0be7bb0e8df2c42613ba
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In Global and Planetary Change
In Sociology and Political Science
Citations in the corpus
- The impact of forced displacement on host communities: A review of the empirical literature in economics (2019, background): “One study (Alix-Garcia et al., 2018) focused on the impact of the Kakuma refugee camp on neighboring communities using night lights as a measure of economic activity and distance from the camp as identification strategy.”
- The impact of refugees on employment and wages in Jordan (2019, unknown): “Alix-Garcia et al. (2018) show that natives living near refugee camps benefit from new employment opportunities and favorable price changes.”