The majority of refugees world-wide are located in developing countries. By adopting a more liberal migration policy, it would be possible for the developed countries to accept a larger share of the world’s refugees. A liberal migration policy could be justified from a humanitarian perspective, but there might also be economic benefits for the recipient country, especially in the long run. This study aims to provide empirical evidence on to what extent, increased refugee immigration are able to increase the bilateral trade between the immigrant’s native countries and the recipient countries.
An extended gravity model of trade are estimated on cross-sectional migration and trade data between OECD countries and selected countries that have experienced large outflows of refugee migration during 1970-2000. Regional countries are used as control groups to isolate the casual effect. The results are positive, but insignificant at the conventional levels for both imports and exports. Due to the lack of precision, a cautious interpretation would suggest that the migration effect on trade is small and positive, but not significant enough to be used as an argument for increased refugee immigration to the developed countries.