“I feel emotionally close to the plight of refugees”: Economics professor conferred prestigious global honour
February 7 2024
Newly-named International Economic Association Fellow, Professor Sascha Becker.
Twenty years ago, Prof Sascha Becker didn’t foresee that one day he would become a passionate advocate for the plight of refugees and produce research that would inform UN and World Bank policy.
But now Prof Becker, whose research into refugees and persecution has had broad impact, has been named a Fellow of the eminent International Economic Association.
Prof Becker is the first Monash Business School academic to receive the honour, conferred annually to just 10 economists worldwide who have made an important contribution through the creation or dissemination of new ideas and high-quality policy work.
The honour recognises global excellence in research publications and research-driven contributions to policy work, economics curriculum and popular writing.
In 2001, he finished his PhD working on labour economics and international macroeconomics at the European University Institute in Florence/Italy. Like most peers, he would continue progressing to an international career.
Prof Becker’s educational achievements were unique in his family, where he had been the first to finish high school. “I had no (education) template,” he said.
“I tend to quickly get enthusiastic and curious about things, and I followed my passions and they changed over time. Refugees, religion, history, were not on my agenda 20 years ago.”
But as a native German he had always been interested in history and, some years into his academic career, he began to grapple with the topic of anti-Semitism and escaping from persecution.
His research also evolved against his personal backdrop of repeated migration from Germany to France, to Italy, the UK, and then in 2019 to Monash Business School.
“I was an economic migrant – I had months to consider my future, consider costs and benefits. Refugees often don’t have a choice. They have to have to act quickly, in order to escape from danger or persecution. Many refugees lose their houses and family members might get killed.”
Prof Becker’s exceptional body of research on forced migration caught the attention of the World Bank and the UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR), via their Joint Data Center (JDC), which works to improve the evidence base around global refugee policies.
Both now incorporate Prof Becker’s findings into their work with major stakeholders.
His work rigorously tests the well-known “uprootedness hypothesis”, formulated decades ago, which states those who have lost everything, and been uprooted from their home region, will redirect their investments towards things that no one can take away from them, such as education.
The lasting power and effects of education
“When you have lost everything, that makes you rethink life and what is really important,” Prof Becker said.
His research with multiple co-authors, published in the prestigious American Economic Review, found that refugees value education exceptionally highly, because “it is the one thing that cannot be taken away from them,” that they can use to rebuild their lives.
This research centred on ethnic Poles who were forced to relocate from their country’s east to the west following World War II, when the country’s borders changed. Unlike typical refugees, children in these groups were able to immediately restart school.
Prof Becker’s research was also longitudinal in nature, highlighting the positive effects of education on subsequent generations of Polish refugees between 1945 and the modern day.
Prof Becker feels this “silver lining” is all too often ignored in the refugee policies of high-income countries. “Being a refugee is terrible, but when the young generation has quick access to education, it creates multigenerational benefits.”
He is convinced that high-income countries could do more to help refugees, not necessarily by spending more money, but by treating refugee families differently, particularly by speeding up integration of refugee children.
Refugees are often separated from the host population, their children are not allowed to attend school right away, and resources are focused on first establishing the adults’ asylum status before starting integration efforts.
“We often put different types of migrants, economic migrants and refugees in the same box, and I think that’s wrong and needs to change.”
Most refugees come from a background of persecution, and loss of their homes, livelihoods and family members, Prof Becker said. “That baggage makes their start in their destination country so much harder.”
“So often we only see the immediate pain of cost and integration, but there are long-term benefits of getting refugees on their feet again.”
“In some ways, they could become the biggest supporters of their host country for decades and generations to come, and they want to pay back the generosity they received in the best way they can.”
Prof Becker’s other major policy-affiliated recent research work includes research into the causes of Brexit, as well as research into the value of fiscal transfers in EU regions.
He is currently the Xiaokai Yang Chair in Monash Business School’s Department of Economics, and a Principal Investigator of SoDa Labs, which is part of the School’s Impact Labs suite.
In 2021 he was awarded a Monash Business School Dean’s Award for Excellence in Research.
He has published more than 50 journal articles, published 11 book chapters and his research has been cited more than 16,000 times.
More from Prof Sascha Becker:
As they were driven from their homes, these refugees clung to one thing