Refugees in Sweden: Economic integration and wage convergence

This paper studies refugees' ability to assimilate into the labour market of a developed economy, Sweden. The country is not only the most refugee-friendly country in Europe in per capita terms, but it has also the most extensive set of statistics in the world for analysing unemployment, employment and wage trajectories for all immigrants. As the rich Swedish labour market data covers the entire population, refugees' status can be contrasted with various reference groups among the native population. The approach used in this paper is a comparison between different groups of refugees and natives in the same age category. We primarily consider immigrants from the Balkans during the collapse of the state of Yugoslavia in the early 1990s. In the analysis, we contrast these 23 annual cohorts with their counterparts among other immigrants and native-born Swedes. The overall results show sizable heterogeneity in the process of integration depending on immigration category, occupation, education, geographical origin, industrial sector and gender.