Emigration and External Imbalances in Sub-Saharan Africa: Do Migrants' Skills Matter?

Dramane Coulibaly and Blaise Gnimassoun

Journal of African Economies, 2024, vol. 33, issue 3, 322-341

Abstract: The external deficits in SSA countries are a major concern and may be connected to emigration from these countries to advanced economies. According to the life cycle theory, by decreasing labour force, emigration induces a fall in savings and a deterioration in the external balance in the countries of origin. Migrants' remittances may dampen or even counterbalance this effect, depending on migrants' skills that matter for their propensity to remit. Empirical investigation for SSA countries over the period 1990–2014 shows that low-skilled emigration improves the current account balance, whereas high-skilled emigration worsens it because highly skilled emigrants have higher saving potential but tend to remit less than low-skilled ones. Therefore, incentives for the financing of home economies by skilled migrants would be beneficial.

Keywords: SSA; external imbalances; remittances; saving; international migration; JEL classification: F22; F32; O55 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2024
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1093/jae/ejad008 (application/pdf)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
Working Paper: Emigration and External Imbalances in Sub-Saharan Africa: Do Migrants' Skills Matter? (2023)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:oup:jafrec:v:33:y:2024:i:3:p:322-341.

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://academic.oup.com/journals

Access Statistics for this article

Journal of African Economies is currently edited by Francis Teal

More articles in Journal of African Economies from Centre for the Study of African Economies Oxford University Press, Great Clarendon Street, Oxford OX2 6DP, UK. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Oxford University Press ().