Commissioned by the Migration Health Division of IOM’s Regional Office in Brussels (IOM MHD RO Brussels), the CHM designed and conducted the study in 2014-2017, in close cooperation with IOM and primary health care and hospital service providers in four European Union Member States : Austria, Belgium, Italy, and Spain. The thematic study, undertaken within the framework of IOM’s EQUI-HEALTH project “Fostering health provision for migrants, the Roma, and other vulnerable groups”, analysed economic costs related to the exclusion of irregular migrants from access to the mainstream health care system.

Final report, info graphic and explanatory note

Bringing economics, health and migration together: a mutual learning experiment

Workshop organised by the Work group ‚Economic arguments in migrant health policy making‘
at the 12^th European Public Health Conference „Building bridges for solidarity and public health“

Marseille, France –  20-23 November 2019

Acknowledging the role of economic arguments in political discourses and decision-making, researchers have begun to pay more attention to the fiscal implications of different health policy options for migrants. As yet, empirical evidence on economic effects of policy responses to migration and the societal costs or cost-effectiveness of competing strategies to address migrants’ health needs is scarce. Methodological challenges such as limited availability and accessibility of decent data often impede the generation of robust evidence. Further, little is known as to how evidence can effectively be moved into policy; e.g., the actual clout of economic arguments in migration policies debates, as opposed to other evidence- or value-based arguments, hitherto remains unclear.
In other social policy domains such as educational and labour market integration, economic evaluations have become routine components of policy assessments. And under the title of, e.g ., knowledge translation, strategies for the introduction of research evidence into political decision-making processes have been developed. The combination of similar goals and challenges suggests that there are opportunities to build bridges across sectors and disciplines – e.g., public health, social epidemiology, economics, social policy, data science – as well as across research-practice-divides, for the purposes of mutual learning and the joint improvement of research outcomes.
The goal of this workshop is to start such learning processes by bringing together researchers and professionals from different fields, by sharing existing knowledge, and by jointly exploring the following questions:
– What are the thematic intersections, tensions and synergies between the different disciplines? What are common goals and questions? Which kinds of different knowledge complement each other towards those goals?
– Where are options for mutual learning, methodological t ransfer and/or synthesis? How can they help to overcome current challenges in estimating the costs of divergent migrant health policies?
– What can be learnt from existing knowledge translation strategies as regards the role of research for migrant health policy making?
– What challenges and open questions remain?