Can Venezuelan scenario be repeated in Tunisia? The role of remittances in an inflationary context

Over the past decade, remittances to Tunisia have increased significantly. Meantime, the Tunisian economy has grown by as little as 0.6 percent on average with inflation averaging six percent. With the harmful economic and social consequences of the COVID-19 crisis as well as the political unrest (especially after Tunisian President Kais Saied invoked Article 80 of the country's 2014 constitution to suspend parliament amid nationwide protests calling for the resignation of the government and the dissolution of the parliament), managing inflation risks seems growingly challenging. Our study is the first attempt to examine the relationship between remittances and Tunisia's inflation dynamics in the central and tail distributions over different correlation regimes. Particularly, we use a copula-based approach that sheds a new light on the dynamic dependence between inflation and remittances. This technique allows to control for possible asymmetries in the form of a high or crisis dependence and a low or a normal state dependence. Our results robustly reveal that remittances are prominent factor determining inflation in Tunisia. More interestingly, we show that remittances and inflation are more strongly correlated during high uncertainty conditions rather than low uncertainty regime. Such accurate insights on the dynamic relationship between remittances and inflation would allow the central bank to anticipate more effectively the evolution of inflation and to propose more appropriate instruments to control it in a context of high inflationary pressures and heightened political uncertainty.