The number of people seeking asylum in the EU is on the rise and continue to be confronted with widely diverging standards in the individual Member States. Moreover, the burdens of the EU's common refugee policy are very unevenly distributed.

The EU Member States have not significantly incorporated the issue in the recast asylum package, including the Dublin III-Regulation. All that is proposed within the Dublin III-Regulation is a non-binding early-warning system to flag overstretch in national asylum systems and support from EASO in coping with crises. The Commission, European Parliament and the Council have repeatedly called for an asylum system that lives up to the principle of solidarity; other actors even have called for complete abolition of the Dublin Regulation.

One route would be to specify an equitable reception quota for each Member State, to be adjusted annually according to a transparant calculation method. In this light, this SVR Policy Brief, in cooperation with the German Institute for International and Security Affairs, proposed a multi-factor model which takes into account the economic strength, population, size of territory and unemployment rate of individual EU countries, aiming to calculate a fair reception quota for every Member State.

More specific, following indicators would be weighed to calculate the reception quota:

• Gross Domestic Product, 40%
• Total population, 40%
• Geographical area, 10%
• Unemployment rate, 10%

Further, a simulation of the reception quota for 2013 based on this model are provided in the study, accompanied with a comparison of actual asylum applications between 2008 and 2012 to present the deviation rate.