Do remittances matter for health outcomes in developing countries? Fresh evidence from a panel vector autoregressive (PVAR) model

Ronald Djeunankan and Honoré Tekam

International Journal of Development Issues, 2022, vol. 21, issue 3, 458-482

Abstract: Purpose - This study aims to contribute to the growing literature on the effects of remittances and the determinants of health outcomes by analysing for the first time the effect of remittances on health outcomes in developing countries using a panel vector autoregression (PVAR) model. Design/methodology/approach - This study uses panel data from 107 developing countries over the period from 1990 to 2018 to examine the effect of remittances on health outcome in developing countries. Findings - The main findings from study is that remittances improve health outcomes in developing countries. Another finding of this study is that income, trade, foreign direct investment and financial devlopment improve health outcome. Originality/value - The contribution of this study is fourfold. Firstly, it adopts the PVAR methodology in a Generalized Method of Moments framework proposed by Abrigo and Love (2016). Secondly, it analyses the implications of remittances on health outcomes by relying on two comprehensive measures of health outcomes commonly used in the literature which are life expectancy at birth and the rate of under-five mortality rates. Thirdly, we identify governance and maternal education as the channels through which remittances improve health outcomes in developing countries. Finally, the current paper covers an extensive time span (29 years) and focuses on a large sample (107 countries).

Keywords: Remittances; Health outcomes; PVAR; Developing countries; F22; I15 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.emerald.com/insight/content/doi/10.110 ... d&utm_campaign=repec (text/html)
https://www.emerald.com/insight/content/doi/10.110 ... d&utm_campaign=repec (application/pdf)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers

Related works:
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:eme:ijdipp:ijdi-04-2022-0079

DOI: 10.1108/IJDI-04-2022-0079

Access Statistics for this article

International Journal of Development Issues is currently edited by Dr Dilip Dutta

More articles in International Journal of Development Issues from Emerald Group Publishing Limited
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Emerald Support ().