The impact of Syrian refugees on province level growth in Turkey

The civil war that began in Syria in 2011 caused many Syrian refugees to migrate to Turkey. The concentration of forced migrants, which affected border provinces in the beginning, spread throughout Turkey over time, and the impact of refugees on the Turkish economy has become one of the most outstanding topics of discussion. The effects of Syrian refugees in the destination provinces through the labor market, capital inflow, foreign trade and prices have been the focus of the studies in this field. The aim of this study is to examine how the GDP growth was affected by migration in the provinces on the Syrian border, which is the first destination of immigrants, and to determine the net effect of the economic variables examined in previous studies. In this direction, the position of border provinces is compared with the provinces that do not receive refugees and have a similar trend with border provinces, using the difference of differences method, which is frequently used in the literature in the analysis of forced migrations. The findings reveal that, the average growth rate of the provinces that receive refugees is 5.48 percentage points higher than the compared provinces. As a complement to the difference in differences findings, the post-migration change in the components of growth of the impacted regions was analyzed using the regional benchmarking method. Result of the analysis indicated that despite the increase in the average growth rate of the provinces, all regions were not affected by this increase equally.