Project Draft Paper
Municipal Governance Quality, Forced Migration, and the Environmental Outcomes
Publisher
ERF
Date
November, 2020
Mass refugee migration has brought additional challenges to local governments in Europe, the Middle East and certain regions of Africa and Asia. In this paper, we focus on the case of Syrian refugees in Turkey and show that the quality of local governance plays a critical role in mitigating the environmental deterioration. Following the World Bank’s Local Governance Performance Index, we employ text analysis methods to construct a unique data set on local governance quality from the independent audit reports on municipalities. Using a quasi-experimental econometric strategy, we show that the Syrian refugee influx has worsened environmental outcomes along several dimensions in Turkey. Specifically, we find that the deterioration in environmental outcomes is almost entirely driven by provinces with poor-quality governance. Those provinces fail to invest sufficiently in waste management practices and environmental services in response to increased refugee settlements. We argue that good local governance practices can smooth out the refugee integration process and complement the efforts of central governments.
Authors
Cevat Aksoy
Principal Economist, Office of the Chief Economist...
Research Fellows
Semih Tumen
Professor of Economics, TED University, Turkey