Refugees: The UNHCR Resettlement Programme from International Standards to State Implementation

Economists have extensively applied the theory of international public goods in the areas of defence (especially NATO), health and environment, but it has rarely been touched upon refugee issues and burden-sharing. International public good approach is valuable in assessing burden-sharing because it allows considerations of cost-benefit distribution in determining the allocation of the burden. The field of refugees represents a challenge to international public good, since benefits and costs are hard to analyse and quantify. As stated in Chapter Two, massive influx of refugees and asylum seekers can also bring externalities, such as pressure on welfare state or social instability. In conclusion, relating refugee distribution to a mere financial problem is misrepresenting the complexity of the field. The first step is to understand why an international resettlement refugee regime can be considered as an international public good, and eventually managed as such.
Recent decades have seen shifts in what is considered and treated as “private” and “public”. Markets and states are two of society’s mechanisms for coordinating economic activities and each one has a role in providing public as well as private goods, it all depends on the good (or service) to be provided. In some cases, public goods complement private goods. For instance, escaping poverty is difficult to achieve if there is no public consensus on respect for all people’s lives – on people’s need to drink unpolluted water, eat safe food, enjoy the benefits of protection against ill health. Thus a decent life depends on having such goods in the public domain and available to all to consume.
What are public goods? According to the standard definition by Samuelson, a public good distinguishes itself from a private good by its properties of
- Non-excludability: a good is non-excludable if it is not possible to exclude someone from the consumption of the good;
- Non- rivalry: a good is non-rival if the consumption of one prevents simultaneous consumption by other consumers.
The above properties of public goods are basic in that they have not been altered by public policies or other human actions. Public goods are usually left in the domain of state, while private goods are assigned to market. This dualistic definition is misrepresenting of the variety of goods, since both state and market can contribute to the private and public domains at the same time. A distinction has to be made between the goods’ basic or original properties (such as being non-rival and nonexcludable) and their actual characteristics – those that society has assigned them.
For some goods the basic and the actual qualities may be the same, for example the moonlight. But for many, perhaps even most, non-rivalry and non-excludability are related to society. For instance land is rival and non-excludable in its original state, but property rights regimes that regulate land ownership make this excludable good a private one. Moreover, even if land can be considered as a private good, many traditional societies maintain open, non-exclusive grazing and hunting fields. Also, some communities still manage as commons few natural resources as land, or water. Although the literature on public goods is extensive, the standard definition of public goods is still anchored on non-rivalry and non-excludability. But the properties of goods do not always correspond to this dualistic-standard definition and society can modify the non-rivalry and non-excludability of good’s benefits. Goods often became public as a result of policy choices, that is why further considerations should be done in order to expand this definition – to recognise that in many cases, goods exist not in their original forms but as social constructs, largely determined by policies and other collective human actions. [...]