Matching refugees to towns in Britain: Tim Harford in the FT

In the Financial Times, Tim Harford writes about resettling refugees: The refugee crisis — match us if you can--‘However many refugees we decide to resettle, there’s no excuse for doing the process wastefully’

"By balancing competing demands, good matching mechanisms have alleviated real suffering in school systems and organ donation programmes. Now two young Oxford academics, Will Jones of the Refugee Studies Centre and Alexander Teytelboym of the Institute for New Economic Thinking, are trying to persuade governments to use matching mechanisms in the refugee crisis.

Most popular discussions of the crisis focus on how many refugees we in rich countries should accept. Yet other questions matter too. Once nations, or groups of countries, have decided to resettle a certain number of refugees from temporary camps, to which country should they go? Or within a country, to which area?

Different answers have been tried over the years, from randomly dispersing refugees to using the best guesses of officials, as they juggle the preferences of local communities with what they imagine the refugees might want.

In fact, this is a classic matching problem. Different areas have different capabilities. Some have housing but few school places; others have school places but few jobs; still others have an established community of refugees from a particular region. And refugee families have their own skills, needs and desires.

This is not so different a problem from allocating trainee doctors to teaching hospitals, or children to schools, or even kidneys to compatible recipients. In each case, we can get a better match through a matching mechanism. However many refugees we decide to resettle, there’s no excuse for doing the process wastefully.

There is no perfect mechanism for matching refugees to communities — there are too many variables at play — but there are some clear parameters: housing is a major constraint, as is the availability of medical care. Simple systems exist, or could be developed, that should make the process more efficient, stable and dignified."