Gauging the responsibility assumed by national governments in receiving asylum seekers: An overlooked cornerstone of the EU asylum policy

Abstract

The unequal sharing of responsibilities across countries regarding displaced persons remains an extremely sensitive political issue pending resolution within the EU. The issue of how to measure countries’ responsibility for asylum poses even further challenges, as it is essential to have a good understanding of the extent of the problem in order to avoid the disclosure of erroneous information. In this paper, we stress that conventional statistics on relative asylum responsibility based on the number of registered asylum applications can be misleading. It, therefore, calls for the development of a comprehensive and harmonised set of data on asylum-related fiscal costs so that researchers and institutions can properly assess the balance of effort between the EU countries.