Refugee or Internally Displaced Person?

The literature on the decision to abandon one's home in the face of violence is dominated by scholarship that implicitly assumes that forced migrants had no choice but to leave. Yet a spate of recent studies adopts a general rational choice framework that identifies new questions and challenges some conventional wisdom. This study builds on that work and breaks new ground by investigating the circumstances that lead some countries to produce a large number of refugees and relatively few internally displaced persons (IDPs) as opposed to a large number of IDPs and relatively few refugees. The investigators present the hypothesis that refugee flows are greater in the face of state (sponsored) genocide/politicide than they are in response to other state coercion, dissident campaigns of violence, or civil wars. It is argued that countries surrounded by poor, authoritarian regimes will produce fewer refugees (relative to IDPs) than those surrounded by wealthy, democratic neighbors. A sample selection model is employed to conduct statistical analyses using data on a global sample of countries for the period 1976-1995.