(Page 7 of 16) - "Burden-Sharing": The International Politics of Refugee Protection authored by Thielemann, Eiko.

remains suboptimal. Resulting problems of under-provision in public goods are
widespread and are particularly prominent in the international arena.

There are a number of problems with the ‘exploitation’ model, in that some of the
assumptions that make the model neat and parsimonious are incongruous with empirical
reality. First, most international collective goods are not pure public goods. Second,
there are not just one but several ways that states can contribute to an international
collective good and national costs of production of particular contribution are unlikely to
be identical. Third, it seems necessary to take into account the effects of consultation
among states (in particular when dealing with the EU), as regimes that result from such
consultation will help to overcome some of the difficulties in public good provision that
have been identified above. These challenges to the ‘pure public good model’ will be
address in the remainder of this paper.

National Preferences: Impure Public Goods and Private Benefits

Several authors have consequently offered extensions to pure public good framework.
They argue that pure public goods are a rare phenomenon. The extent of free-riding is
dependent on the degree of 'publicness' of the good in question (Sandler 1977; Sandler
and Forbes 1980; Sandler and Hartley 2001). Most goods (even those often referred to as
public goods), yield contributor-specific benefits. Hence, even when a good is partly
public, there might well be private reasons that motivate contributions. For example, a
country will have plenty of incentives of reducing poisonous emissions if they majority
of these emission fall onto its own soil. I.e. there are plenty of private incentives to curb
emissions, even though doing so will also benefit downwind neighboring countries
(Sandler and Hartley 1995: 60). In the defense context an ally might build up its arsenal
not only to enhance regional security but also to maintain control over colonies, use
defense procurement as a form of regional aid that guarantees employment, or maintain a
large army for status enhancement. In this context, public benefits accrue to the nation's
population, but there is little, if any, spill over to the nation's ally. Such benefits are thus
excludable and rival among allies and hence partly private (or impurely public).
According to Sandler and Forbes (1980: 429), some (aspects of) collectively produced
goods are public (non-excludable) within a nation but private (excludable) between allies.

When relating these insights to the area of forced migration, one can make the following
observations. It is certainly true that the provision of enhanced security provided by
refugee protection, benefits not only countries which contribute to the protection of
displaced persons but these benefits are also extended to other actors at no marginal cost.
However, refugee protection arguably, provides a spectrum of outputs ranging from
purely public to private or country-specific outputs. This means that refugee protection
provides more than the single output of ‘security’ implied by the pure public goods
model: it also provides country specific security benefits, status enhancement or the
achievement of ideological goals (such as when West during the cold war was keen to
accept political refugees from behind the Iron Curtain). In other words what is often
regarded as a public good has in fact excludable (private) benefits to a country.