Many development economists believe that remittances by the migrant workers are an important source of long rum growth. Therefore, recent studies have investigated the indirect and direct effects remittances on the growth rates of the recipient countries. This paper analyses the strength of these effects with a common data set and with alternative methods of estimation. It is found that while the evidence supports the indirect effects of remittances, the direct growth effects of remittances seem to be insignificant.

Development economists believe that migrant workers' remittances are an important source of funds for long run growth. Therefore, recent studies have investigated the growth effects of remittances and reached different conclusions. In many such studies the growth of output is simply regressed on both remittances and the channels through which remittances affect growth. Thus there is no distinction between the indirect and direct growth effects of remittances and such specifications may give unreliable estimates because of the correlation between the channels and remittances. In this paper we make a distinction between the indirect and direct effects of remittances.Our model is estimated with panel data of 40 high remittance recipient countries and a system GMM panel data estimation method.

This article shows that the effect of remittances on economic growth involves a U-shaped pattern, which is negative initially but later becomes positive. The analysis differs significantly from earlier studies in that it examines important methodological issues on the specification and estimation of the long-run growth effects of remittances by estimating their impact on total factor productivity (TFP) rather than on the growth rate of GDP, using time series data from Bangladesh. The use of single-equation cointegration methods shows that remittances' effect on long-run growth in Bangladesh is negative and falling until the remittances-to-GDP ratio is roughly eight per cent. The benefits of remittances receipts outweigh their costs and their net effects start to become positive when the ratio exceeds 14 per cent.

This paper examines the impact of inward remittances flows on per capita gross domestic product (GDP) growth in Bangladesh during 1976-2012. We find that the growth effect of remittances is negative at first but becomes positive at a later stage, evidence of a non-linear relationship. Unproductive use of remittances was rampant in the beginning when they were received by migrant families, but better social and economic investments led to more productive utilization of remittances receipts at later periods. This suggests a U-shaped relationship between remittances and per capita GDP growth. Unlike what is suggested in the literature, that the effect of remittances is more pronounced in a less financially developed economy, our evidence does not show that the effect of remittances on per capita GDP growth in Bangladesh is conditional on the level of financial development.

We examine the long-run relationship between remittances and the real exchange rate for less developed countries using a panel cointegration approach. We employ an innovative method for the measurement of the multilateral real effective exchange rate and we focus on high remittance economies. We find a small inelastic, but significant, long-run relationship which confirms a "Dutch disease" type effect. Short-run confirmation is given by a panel error correction model. Potential asymmetries in this relationship are explored using quantile regression analysis. JEL Codes: F0, F4, O1.

No abstract

Abstract:It is widely believed by development economists that the role of human capital is one of the most fundamental determinants of economic growth. Sustained growth depends on the level of human capital whose stocks increase due to better education, higher levels of health, new learning and training procedure. The intuition that good health raises the level of human capital and has a positive effect on productivity and economic growth has been modelled by enodogenous growth theorists. But empirically ascertaining the causal relationship between health and growth is more difficult due to the possible existence of endogeneity between these two variables. We use a production function based approach and model the role of health as a regular factor of production. Additionally, we depart from all the previous literature by estimating the gender disaggregated effect of human health on economic growth. We adopt a constant return to scale production function that fits the data in the microeconometric literature on return to human capital. Using this particular production function, we disaggregate the measures of human capital by including male and female life expectancy and school enrolments. Allowing for the dynamics of TFP to be embedded in the production function we empirically test it in growth form using various estimators appropriate for our data. Our main finding is that male life expectancy has a positive effect on the growth of income while female life expectancy has a negative effect, controlling for unobserved time and country effects in a panel of 83 countries from 1960 -2009. We use lag differences of life expectancy and school enrolments and lagged growth rates of other inputs as instruments for controlling the endogenity of health in the growth regressions. We check for the robustness of the results with use of 'deletion diagnostics' to identify influential observations and outliers. The results continue to show that male life expectancy has a positive effect on income growth while that of female has a negative effect.

No abstract