Asylum Migration in OECD Countries: In Search of Lost Well-Being

Alongside the economic determinants and unobserved structural forces that drive migration flows, asylum migration faces additional natural and man-made hazards, which fall in the broad category of well-being. This paper estimates the effect of a composite well-being indicator on asylum migration flows, using a structural gravity equation. The paper starts by augmenting the gravity model to explain asylum flows with country-pair relative well-being, relocation costs and multilateral resistance. Taking the OECD Better Life Index as a starting point, we then combine data envelopment analysis and multi-criteria-decision-making to construct a multidimensional well-being indicator that groups 22 raw indicators into a single composite indicator with 10 consistently comparable dimensions across countries. Then, using a panel of bilateral asylum flows in OECD countries, we are able to obtain theoretically-grounded and consistent estimates. Results reveal that the composite indicator of well-being significantly explains asylum decisions and also show that certain dimensions of well-being act as push and pull determinants.