JDC Literature Review
The JDC literature review contains summaries of recent publications and academic scholarship on issues relating to forced displacement.
Supporting Recently Resettled Refugees in the UK
The author offers several lessons learned from supporting refugees in their search for employment in the UK, including the importance of: Continuous support to navigate a new system, e.g. through regular group/individual discussions to share frustrations, strategies...
Are Asylum Seekers More Likely to Work with More Inclusive Labor Market Access Regulations?
This paper evaluates whether inclusive labor market policies increase the labor market participation of asylum seekers, by exploiting the variation in asylum policies in Swiss cantons to which asylum seekers are randomly allocated. During the period from 2011 to 2014,...
The Gig Economy in Complex Refugee Situations
This article explores the challenges and opportunities presented by the gig economy for Syrian refugees in Jordan. Research with Syrian female refugees in Jordan suggests that, despite significant challenges, the gig economy (where workers and purchasers of their...
Refugee Livelihoods: New Actors, New Models
This article explores the potential contributions of governments, development actors, the private sector, and humanitarian actors to support refugee livelihoods. The authors begin by making the case for the early economic inclusion of refugees in order not to prevent...
Validating Highly Educated Refugees’ Qualifications
This article highlights initiatives in Sweden and Norway to streamline procedures for validating refugees’ qualifications. There are lengthy processes for validating foreign qualifications in Norway, Sweden and Germany, which prevent some highly educated refugees from...
Expanding Economic Opportunities in Protracted Displacement
The ‘Supporting Syria and the Region’ conference in London in 2016 set an ambitious target to create up to 1.1 million new jobs for refugees and host communities by 2018—but there was no clarity around how, where, and for whom these jobs would be created. A 2016 joint...
Syrian Refugee Entrepreneurship in Turkey – Integration and the Use of Immigrant Capital in the Informal Economy
This article examines small-scale entrepreneurship of Syrian refugees in three Turkish cities: Istanbul, Gaziantep, and Hatay. The author uses ‘forms of capital’ as an analytical frame, encompassing: (a) economic capital; (b) social capital; (c) cultural capital...
Cities as a Refuge, Cities as a Home: The Relationship between Place and Perceptions of Integration among Urban Displaced Populations in Iraq
Cities in Iraq have absorbed the majority of IDPs since the beginning of the ISIL conflict in early 2014—at the peak of the conflict only 12 percent of the 3.4 million IDPs settled in camps while 88 percent settled in urban areas. By the end of 2018 there were 1.8...
The Labor Market Integration of Refugees to the United States: Do Entrepreneurs in the Network Help?
The paper examines whether entrepreneurs in the social network of refugees, from the same country of origin, facilitate refugees’ labor-market integration by hiring them in their businesses. The authors analyze the universe of refugee cases without ties to the United...
Obstacles to Refugees’ Self-Reliance in Germany
This article discusses the impediments to refugees’ employment and self-reliance in Germany. The majority of refugees and asylum seekers in Germany rely on government welfare. There are many practical barriers to work including: (a) access to government language...