Do Workers’ Remittances Promote Economic Growth?

Michael Gapen, Ralph Chami, Peter Montiel, Adolfo Barajas and Connel Fullenkamp

No 2009/153, IMF Working Papers from International Monetary Fund

Abstract: Over the past decades, workers' remittances have grown to become one of the largest sources of financial flows to developing countries, often dwarfing other widely-studied sources such as private capital and official aid flows. While it is undeniable that remittances have poverty-alleviating and consumption-smoothing effects on recipient households, a key empirical question is whether they also serve to promote long-run economic growth. This study tackles this question and addresses the main shortcomings of previous empirical work, focusing on the appropriate measurement, and incorporating an instrument that is both correlated with remittances and would only be expected to affect growth through its effect on remittances. The results show that, at best, workers' remittances have no impact on economic growth.

Keywords: WP; remittance; remittance inflow; GDP; worker remittance variable; remittance flow (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 22
Date: 2009-07-01
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (163)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.imf.org/external/pubs/cat/longres.aspx?sk=23108 (application/pdf)

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:imf:imfwpa:2009/153

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
http://www.imf.org/external/pubs/pubs/ord_info.htm

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in IMF Working Papers from International Monetary Fund International Monetary Fund, Washington, DC USA. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Akshay Modi (amodi@imf.org).