This paper analyses the influence of welfare benefit levels on migrants' location choices within their host country and thus provides a rare empirical test of the Welfare Magnet Hypothesis. In Austria, asylum seekers are distributed across federal states according to a quota, but once they are granted protection, they are free to move wherever they want. Welfare benefit levels for refugees vary over states depending on a person's protection status and - due to a series of welfare benefit reforms at the state level - over time. This institutional structure allows to causally identify the effect of welfare benefit differentials on refugees' first autonomous location choice. We employ two complementary identification strategies, the first is based on variation over states and protection-status groups. The second is based on the welfare reforms at the state level and exploits variation over states, groups and time. The results provide evidence in favour of the Welfare Magnet Hypothesis.

"The best way of handling the question of how much to give the poor, politicians have discovered, is to avoid doing anything about it at all," note Paul Peterson and Mark Rom. The issue of the minimum people need in order to live decently is so difficult that Congress has left this crucial question to the states—even though the federal government foots three-fourths of the bill for about 15 million Americans who receive cash and food stamp benefits. The states differ widely in their assessment of what a family needs to meet a reasonable standard of living, and the interstate differences in welfare benefits cannot be explained by variations in wage levels or costs of living. The states with higher welfare benefits act as magnets by attracting or retaining poor people. In the competition to avoid becoming welfare havens, states have cut welfare benefits in real dollars by more than one-third since 1970. The authors propose the establishment of a minimum federal welfare standard, which would both reduce the interstate variation in welfare benefits and stem their overall decline. Peterson and Rom develop their argument in four steps. First they show how the politics of welfare magnets works in a case study of policymaking in Wisconsin. Second, they present their analysis of the overall magnet effect in American state politics, finding evidence that states with high welfare benefits experiencing disproportionate growth in their poverty rates make deeper welfare cuts. Third, they describe the process by which the current system came into being, identifying the reform efforts and political crises that have contributed to the centralization of welfare policy as well as the regional, partisan, and group interests that have resisted these changes. Finally, the authors propose a practical step that can go a long way toward achieving a national welfare standard; then assess it's cost, benefits, and political feasibility.

In Austria, asylum seekers are distributed across federal states according to a quota, but once they are granted protection, they are free to move wherever they want. Welfare benefit levels for refugees vary over states depending on a person's protection status and - due to a series of welfare benefit reforms at the state level over time. This institutional structure allows to causally identify the effect of welfare benefit differentials on refugees' first autonomous location choice. We employ two complementary identification strategies, the first is based on variation over states and protection-status groups. The second is based on the welfare reforms at the state level and exploits variation over states, groups and time. The results suggest a strong response of refugees' propensity to migrate to changes in welfare benefit levels.

We study the effects of welfare generosity on international migration using reforms of immigrant welfare benefits in Denmark. The first reform, implemented in 2002, lowered benefits for non-EU immigrants by about 50%, with no changes for natives or EU immigrants. The policy was later repealed and re-introduced. Based on a quasi-experimental research design, we find sizeable effects: the benefit reduction reduced the net flow of immigrants by about 5,000 people per year, and the subsequent repeal of the policy reversed the effect almost exactly. The implied elasticity of migration with respect to benefits equals 1.3. This represents some of the first causal evidence on the welfare magnet hypothesis.

Abstract: This paper revisits the magnet hypothesis and investigates the impact of the welfare generosity on the difference between skilled and unskilled migration rates. The main purpose of the paper is to assess the role of mobility restriction on shaping the effect of the welfare state genrosity. In a free migration regime, the impact is expected to be negative on the skill composition of migrants while in a restricted mobility regime, the impact will be the opposite, as voters will prefer selective migration policies, favoring skilled migrants who tend to be net contributors to the fiscal system. We utilize the free labor movement within EUR (the EU, Norway and Switzerland) and the restricted movement from outside of the EUR to compare the free migration.

This is an open access title available under the terms of a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 License. It is free to read, download and share on Elgaronline.com. This timely book explores how Northern European countries have sought to balance their welfare states with increased levels of migration from low-income countries outside the EU. Using case studies of the Netherlands, Germany, Denmark, and Sweden, leading scholars analyse the varying approaches to this so-called ‘progressive dilemma’.

Covers the period 1946-1989.

"The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic marks the most significant, singular global disruption since World War II, with health, economic, political, and security implications that will ripple for years to come." -Global Trends 2040 (2021) Global Trends 2040-A More Contested World (2021), released by the US National Intelligence Council, is the latest report in its series of reports starting in 1997 about megatrends and the world's future. This report, strongly influenced by the COVID-19 pandemic, paints a bleak picture of the future and describes a contested, fragmented and turbulent world. It specifically discusses the four main trends that will shape tomorrow's world: - Demographics-by 2040, 1.4 billion people will be added mostly in Africa and South Asia. - Economics-increased government debt and concentrated economic power will escalate problems for the poor and middleclass. - Climate-a hotter world will increase water, food, and health insecurity. - Technology-the emergence of new technologies could both solve and cause problems for human life. Students of trends, policymakers, entrepreneurs, academics, journalists and anyone eager for a glimpse into the next decades, will find this report, with colored graphs, essential reading.