The Location of Hosted Asylum Seekers in OECD Regions and Cities

Abstract This document provides a comparative assessment on the location of hosted asylum seekers in 18 European countries at the level of TL3 regions and in six countries at the municipal level. The assessment is based on an ad-hoc data collection from national statistical offices and governmental agencies in charge of monitoring the hosting of asylum seekers. The analysis aims to maximize data comparability across countries by focusing on those asylum seekers who are hosted in the reception system. Results show that, on average, asylum seekers are less concentrated in urban areas than the resident population. This result is robust at different geographical scales, namely at the scale of small administrative regions (OECD TL3), at that of functional urban areas—a comparable definition of cities applied to OECD countries—and at the municipal level. In the subset of countries where information was available, the share of asylum seekers in rural areas has on average increased between 2011 and 2015. The dispersal measures implemented in several of the countries considered might have played a role in this respect.