Refugee and Asylum Seeker Flow Data

The lab is grateful to have had the opportunity to work with the United Nations Refugee Agency (UNHCR) on its release of (directed) dyadic, yearly refugee and asylum seeker flow data, released ahead of this year’s World Refugee Day. The raw data may be accessed directly from the UNHCR at the following address:

https://www.unhcr.org/refugee-statistics/insights/explainers/forcibly-displaced-flow-data.html

Alternatively, panel datasets at the origin country-year; asylum country-year; and directed dyad-year may be accessed below:*

https://dataverse.harvard.edu/dataset.xhtml?persistentId=doi:10.7910/DVN/ID1FG0

With inputs from the PVL, The Economist includes findings of this new data here: “How the war in Ukraine compares to other refugee crises”

CITATIONS:

1) UNHCR Refugee Data Finder

2) Shaver, A., Krick, B., Blancaflor, J., Liu, X., Samara, G., Ku, S., Hu, S., Carreon, M., Lim, T., Raps, R., Velasquez, A., Angelo, J., de Melo, S. & Zuo, Z. “The Causes and Consequences of Refugee Flows: A Contemporary Re-Analysis.” Empirical Studies of Conflict Project. Working Paper No. 29 (2022)

3) Fearon, J. & Shaver, A. “Civil War Violence and Refugee Outflows.” Empirical Studies of Conflict Project. Working Paper No. 25 (2021)

*Using data corresponding to the year on which the UNHCR began tracking refugees and asylum seekers by country , we construct asylum country- and directed dyad-year panel datasets in which observations of NA are entered for years preceding the initiation of country-specific collection efforts. Because data on flows were typically secured at the level of the asylum (and not origin) country, for the origin country-year panel dataset, we are able to identify only a subset of those observations for which data was incomplete or missing. For those cases, we similarly set values to NA but urge caution when using origin country-year data as some historical values may only partially reflect total outflows.