An Alternative View on Distribution Keys for the Possible Relocation of Refugees in the European Union

Abstract

The major social and human problem today is the extreme number of refugees, e.g., politically determined, from various conflicts zone around the world. The European Union currently discusses the possible distribution and relocation of these refugees among the member states. The European Commission suggested keys to the distribution based on aggregated indicators, which for obvious reasons has its pitfalls. Here distribution keys based on a partial ordering approach is discussed. The choice of indicators apparently is crucial due to the relative importance of the single indicators. Two approaches are applied to derive distribution keys, both taking the onset in the average ordering of the 28 EU countries. In the first simple approach, independently of the choice of indicators among the here applied, five countries, i.e., Denmark, Germany, The Netherlands, Sweden and The United Kingdom consequently are found among the Top-10 countries that should receive the major parts of refugees. In a second approach, applying a normalization based on population size the bigger countries with fairly solid economies are suggested to receive the majority of accepted refugees. The eventual choice of indicators as well as the normalization process is a political discussion and is not part of the present study.