The current “refugee crisis” has led to a lot of soul searching among EU officials and policy-makers in the member states about the effectiveness of the EU’s common asylum policy, resulting in calls for reform and a “fair” system of burden sharing. But what do we actually know so far about the impact of the common asylum policy? How has it affected member states’ asylum policies and the distribution of asylum seekers across the EU’s member states? Dimiter Toshkow and Laura de Haan have shown in an article published in the Journal of European Public Policy in 2013, that “there is evidence for limited convergence but not at the lowest level, and the convergence is not sufficient to erase the unequal burden of asylum applications and admitted refuges carried by the different European states.” Read the article here. Read also Natascha Zaun’s article “Why EU asylum standards exceed the lowest common denominator”, recently published in the Journal of European Public Policy.