Announcements
Prof. Guy Grossman Presents the Dataset of World Refugee and Asylum Policies (DWRAP) at the World Bank’s LJD Week 2025
Event: Legal Briefs: Short Talks on Legal Innovations
Hosted by: World Bank Group – Law, Justice and Development (LJD) Week 2025
Date: November 4, 2025
At this year’s Law, Justice and Development (LJD) Week, Professor Guy Grossman (University of Pennsylvania, PDRI-DevLab) introduced and described the Dataset of World Refugee and Asylum Policies (DWRAP), an innovative tool that codifies de jure asylum and refugee provisions across 193 countries from 1951 to 2022 into simple, quantitative indicators. His presentation illustrated the structure and content of the dataset and showcased the DWRAP interactive platform, designed to make the data accessible to a broad audience of policymakers, researchers, and practitioners working on refugee and asylum policy.
Developed in collaboration with Christopher Blair (Princeton University) and Jeremy Weinstein (Harvard University), DWRAP represents the most comprehensive cross-national coding of refugee and asylum laws to date, covering more than 950 legal instruments. The dataset organizes 54 policy provisions across five key dimensions:
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Access – how refugees enter and secure legal status
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Services – education, social protection, and health entitlements
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Livelihoods – rights to work, own property, and use land
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Movement – freedom of movement and documentation
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Citizenship and Participation – political rights and naturalization pathways
By converting decades of fragmented legal text into a structured and comparable index, DWRAP allows users to trace how asylum systems have evolved and to assess the liberality of national protection regimes using a standardized 0–1 scale.
Prof. Grossman emphasized how DWRAP, now hosted on the World Bank Development Data Hub, enhances global understanding of how legal frameworks shape displacement and supports more data-driven policymaking on forced migration.
Explore DWRAP: