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case study, he argues that given enlightened public intervention, refugees can
become a positive economic force 27 . He maintains that his study, uniquely, uses
National Income Accounts to assess the impact of the (Republic of Cyprus)
Government's re-housing strategy, and that these prove the centrai role played by
the following policy in the recovery. Government provided funds for refugee
housing schemes which stimulated the construction industry and simultaneously
provided homes, jobs, income and new demand.
Highly Interventionist economic development policy, it is argued, with its
emphasis on housing for refugees, stimulated a demand led recovery. 28
Indisputably, the role of the Government of the Republic expanded dramatically
after the de facto division of the island. However the debate here is whether it
expanded to provide the necessary humanitarian and politicai response to a massive
humanitarian and politicai disaster or whether it combined that response with a
systematic reconstruction policy, aimed at restoring
investment confidence,
providing an income multiplier to boost demand and ultimately restoring economic
viability in a severely dislocated, truncated economy. Clearly both policies enacted
simultaneously do not Stretch credibility to unreasonable lengths. However, the
government's concerns must have mirrored those of the population at large (both the
optimistic and pessimistic interprétations referred to above). The Government could
not be seen to implement policy which seemed to perceive the territorial changes as
being permanent. Such a policy would have conflicted with both its own rhetoric
and the démocratie constraint (40% of the increasingly most politicised part of the
electorate wished to return to their homes and businesses north of the UN cease fire
line).
27 ibid.
28 ibid., p.10.
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