The impact of the Syrian Refugee Crisis on the health access in Turkiye: A synthetic control analysis

Abstract

One of the most critical determinants of a healthy life is the level of accessibility to health services when needed. The literature defines the unmet need for healthcare services as "whether the individual (in the last twelve months) cannot apply to a doctor despite the need for medical examination or treatment." One of the main reasons to cause an unmet health care need is the expensive healthcare cost due to increased demand. Mainly, there are increases in demand due to reasons such as population growth and migration movements. Turkey experienced a large-scale migration as a consequence of the Syrian civil war. Based on the Disaster and Emergency Management Agency figures, as of 2018, Turkey is home to about 3.4 million Syrian refugees under temporary protection status. İkizler et al. (2020) point out that this large-scale migration results in a nearly 6.3% increase in unmet healthcare need at the beginning of the refugee crisis. However, the effect weakens gradually. This paper aims to support the results of İkizler et al. (2020) by exploiting the synthetic control method, and OECD's and EUROSTAT's country-level data set related to health care. Even though we control for the 2009 crisis, we observe that the synthetic values of the UHCN for Turkey do not coincide well, especially for the period 2009-2010. The results suggest that the impact of the mass influx of refugees on Turkey's UHCN ceases to exist, wiped away mostly by the government's increase in health investment. Although this makes the synthetic series slightly different from Turkey's series, the results provide intuitive information.