Economic impact of syrian refugees on Turkish economy

The Arab Spring began in March 2011, and the Syrian crisis with its minor level demonstrations was expected to end at that. However, the crisis continued to date. An ongoing war inside Syria has not only become a problem for Syrians but also for the neighbouring countries.As a result, over 13 million Syrians fled to the nearby countries. The economic impacts of Syrians refugees in Turkey has been strategically analyzed in this paper. The changes in unemployment rates, housing demand and an overall level of prices in 2012 – 2019 have been researched and analyzed, based on the quarterly data. Johansen cointegration, Granger causality, VAR (Vector Autoregressive Model) and Action-Response function models have been used. The results demonstrate that there is no negative impact on the Turkish economy in the short term, but there is a negative impact in the long term. It follows from the calculations that the increase of the refugee population is affecting the unemployment rate; on the other hand, it horizontally affects the inflation and housing demand. Furthermore, there are periodic GDP increases and decreases. Keywords: Syria, Refugee, Time Series, Johansen Cointegration, Granger Causality, VAR, Immigrant.