(Page 10 of 16) - "Burden-Sharing": The International Politics of Refugee Protection authored by Thielemann, Eiko.

relatively cheaper than another country.

Countries recognize these price differentials

and engage in mutually beneficial trade. This idea has been extended, to the domain of
(impure) public goods (Boyer 1989, 1993; Connolly 1970, 1972; 1976; Kiesling 1974;
Loehr 1973).

It has been argued that in the case of impure public goods, the incentives

for countries to trade are similar to those suggested by David Ricardo's theory for private
goods. In order to apply the trade idea in this domain, contributions to particular public
goods need to broken down into multiple components.

In the case of refugee protection, one feasible component is the provision of protection
opportunities for displaced persons (providing refuge). One might call this a reactive
contribution since it deals with the problem once people have already been displaced.
Other forms of contribution such as engagement in unilateral and multilateral peace-
keeping/making operations are termed proactive contributions since they aim to prevent
refugee flows before they occur. Peace-keeping/enforcement can be viewed as an
alternative way to contribute to security by preventing or limiting uncontrolled flows of
migrants seeking refuge. Like the acceptance of displaced persons, peacekeeping also
possesses key elements of an international public good. If intrastate and interstate
conflicts have negative consequences on other countries in terms of unchecked migration
flows, then peacekeeping efforts to end such wars represent a trans-national public good.
The peace and security provided by keeping migration flows in check through
peacekeeping/making operations thus give rise to non-excludable and non-rival benefits.

It is reasonable to assume that countries are not equally well placed to contribute to
refugee protection in one particular way. To put differently, we can expect the economic
efficiency of countries specific contributions to differ. For example, following a simple
‘economies of scale’ logic, one might expect a country with well established
asylum/refugee institutions will be relatively more efficient in processing and offering
refuge to protection seekers than a country without such institutions. In contrast, a
country with a large army and experience in interventions abroad can be expected to be
more efficient in pro-active refugee protection efforts than a country with a small army
and no such experience.

Countries face varying degrees of political costs in producing

collective goods

Boyer (1993: 38) goes one step further by introducing the concept of political
comparative advantage. In doing so, he questions the assumption of traditional burden-
sharing models which suggest that the costs borne by contributing countries are
exclusively economic in nature. According to Boyer, this is an incomplete picture of the
cost-benefit calculations undertaken by decision-makers and he suggests that some

Individual countries need only have a relative (not an absolute) advantage in the production of a particular

good to be able to reap benefits from specialisation and trade. Even if a country can produce every good
more efficiently than other countries, it will still be better off when it specialises in the production of goods
in which it holds the greatest relative advantage.

In a follow-up paper (Olson and Zeckhauser 1970) to their seminal statement of the 'exploitation'

hypothesis (Olson and Zeckhauser 1966), Olson and Zeckhauser already hinted at the trading idea, but did
not generalise it beyond the domain of military security.