When Syria Was in Egypt’s Land Egyptians Cooperate With Syrians, but Less With Each Other

With the number of Syrians who have fled their country since 2011 exceeding 5 million, and no end in sight of the Syrian civil war, there is little expectation that Syrians currently residing outside of Syria are likely to go back soon. The question of their integration into their respective hosting countries is, therefore, directly policy relevant. We focus on Syrians who fled to Egypt. Cultural, religious and linguistic differences are minor, which is expected to facilitate integration. We ran three incentivized lab-in-the-field experiments with 114 Syrian refugees residing in Egypt and 194 Egyptian nationals to measure various behavioral dimensions such as altruism, cooperation and reciprocity while varying the partner in each game to be either refugee or Egyptian. Our findings indicate that Egyptians treat Syrians more favorably than they treat each other across all games, whereas the behavior of Syrians does not depend on their interaction partner. We argue that this is good news for the integration of Syrians into Egypt but worrying news for the overall development prospects of Egypt