Economic Effects of Germans’ Expulsion from Czechoslovakia Revisited

• Thesis title in Czech: Ekonomické dopady vyhnání Němců z Československa: Nový pohled
• Thesis title in English: Economic Effects of Germans’ Expulsion from Czechoslovakia Revisited
• Key words: Odsun, Československo, poválečný, lokální rozvoj
• English key words: Expulsion, Czechoslovakia, postwar, local development
• Academic year of topic announcement: 2020/2021
• Thesis type: diploma thesis
• Thesis language: angličtina
• Department: Institute of Economic Studies (23-IES)
• Supervisor: PhDr. Jaromír Baxa, Ph.D.
• Author: hidden - assigned by the advisor
• Date of registration: 25.06.2021
• Date of assignment: 25.06.2021
• Date and time of defence: 14.09.2022 09:00
• Venue of defence: Opletalova - Opletalova 26, O206, Opletalova - místn. č. 206
• Date of electronic submission: 25.07.2022
• Date of proceeded defence: 14.09.2022
• Opponents: PhDr. Jiří Schwarz, Ph.D.

Guidelines

Forced migration is an event that is occurring quite often, especially in areas plagued by war or also increasingly in areas affected by climate change. Most papers, however, concentrate on analysing the impacts on the migrants or on the host economies, but not many papers focus on the migrants’ original areas. For that reason, in this thesis, we will investigate the long-run effects of Germans’ expulsion from Czechoslovakia on the Sudetenland, from where the Germans were expelled after World War II.
The expulsion of Germans is an ideal event of forced migration for analysing its impacts on the original country. This is because until the Munich agreement, which became effective in 1938, Czech and German inhabitants lived in the Sudetenland in harmony. In the context of our analysis this means that the treatment group (i.e. German expellees) is very similar to the control group (i.e. Czechs and some Germans that were allowed to stay).
The results could be then applied to similar cases of forced migration.
The economic effects of Germans’ expulsion from Czechoslovakia have already been studied by Patrick A. Testa in 2020 in his paper “The Economic Legacy of Expulsion: Lessons from Postwar Czechoslovakia”. He found dramatic effects of this forced migration – significant negative effects on population density, employment, educational attainment, and on the sector composition (fewer high-skilled jobs, human capital). However, his
results might be overestimated by inclusion of regions that were systematically affected by other processes that complemented the Germans’ expulsion.
This thesis will provide broad replication of Testa’s paper and will test the robustness of his results.

References

Becker, S. O. and A. Ferrara (2019). “Consequences of forced migration: A survey of recent Findings.” Labour Economics. 59. Available at:
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0927537119300132 .
Gerlach, D. (2017). “The Economy of Ethnic Cleansing: The Transformation of the German- Czech Borderlands after WWII.” New York: Cambridge University Press.
Grossmann, J., Jurajda, S. and Roesel, F (2021). “Forced Migration, Staying Minorities, and New Societies: Evidence from Post-War Czechoslovakia.” CESifo Working Paper No. 8950, Available at SSRN:  https://ssrn.com/abstract=3812067 .
Hamermesh, D. (2007). “Replication in Economics.” IZA Discussion Paper No. 2760. Available at: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.1365-2966.2007.00428.x .
Testa, P. A. (2020). “The Economic Legacy of Expulsion: Lessons from Postwar Czechoslovakia.” Available at SSRN:  https://ssrn.com/abstract=3251541 .
Ústav pro soudobé dějiny AV ČR (2005). “Komplex odsunu: Vysídlení Němců a české pohraničí po roce 1945.” Soudobé dějiny XII / 3-4. Available at: http://www.usd.cas.cz/wp-content/uploads/sd_3_4_2005.pdf .

Preliminary scope of work

Methodology:
This thesis will provide broad replication of Testa (2020) and will test the robustness of his results. We will estimate the differences between regions at the language border between Czechs and Germans using data since the expulsion of Germans in 1945. The dataset we will be using is available at the personal website of P. A. Testa, and it comprises digitized data from historical censuses, demographic yearbooks, and statistical journals. Similar to Testa’s paper, we shall estimate the long-term effects using the regression discontinuity around the language border. However, before the estimation, we will exclude some data from the dataset according to our stated hypotheses, in order to test the hypotheses. We might also add data from more recent years.

Hypotheses:
1. Hypothesis #1: Excluding military areas as well as areas nearby, and areas at the South and Western border affects the long-run impacts of the Germans’ expulsion.
2. Hypothesis #2: Excluding the areas with heavy environmental pollution in 1990 might also have an effect on the results of the analysis.
3. Hypothesis #3: The areas in the Borderland might be damaged more by the industrial policy of Comecon than by the expulsion of Germans.

Expected Contribution:
To our knowledge there is only one study analysing the economic effects of Germans’ expulsion on the Sudetenland – the one written by P. A. Testa (2020). We shall provide challenging of this study’s results by excluding military areas from the sample as well as areas nearby. This act largely reduces the dataset, but it might reveal a lot of valuable information. Also omitting data from areas at the South and Western border that
were deserted during the Cold War might yield less significant results. Another matter that may be affecting Testa’s results is that the incentives to settle in North-West Bohemia have then been offset by heavy environmental pollution in 1990 in this area. For that reason, it should also be interesting to exclude this area from the analysis. Lastly, we may inspect whether the industrial policy of the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance (Comecon) during the Cold War have also affected the economic development of the Borderland.
In general, the results of this thesis should provide new information about the effects of forced migration on the migrants’ original area of residence. This knowledge of what will happen to such areas, where the population suddenly decreases in a significant way, will also be useful in the future when the cases of forced migration due to climate change might be increasing, or in determining what will happen in current or future warzone areas.