Remittance flows appear to be falling worldwide for the first time in decades as a result of the ongoing financial turmoil. It is suspected that the drop in remittance income into developing and emerging markets will have a destabilizing effect on these economies. The paper estimates the impact of remittances on output stability for countries that are dependent on these income flows. Using a sample of 70 countries, including 16 advanced economies and 54 developing countries, we find robust evidence that remittances have a negative effect on output growth volatility of recipient countries. This result supports the notion that remittance flows are a stabilizing influence on output. Thus, the fall in remittances precipitated by the ongoing global financial crisis could potentially increase output variability in recipient countries. This would present a hard challenge for governments in those countries already suffering from the crisis: they must resort to an already stressed and limited set of policy instruments, such as fiscal policy, to counter the resulting adverse economic and social impacts of lower remittances.
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Paper provided by International Monetary Fund in its series IMF Working Papers with number
09/91.
References listed on IDEAS Please report citation or reference errors to , or , if you are the registered author of the cited work, log in to your RePEc Author Service profile, click on "citations" and make appropriate adjustments.:
M. Ayhan Kose & Eswar Prasad & Kenneth S. Rogoff & Shang-Jin Wei, 2006.
"Financial Globalization: A Reappraisal,"
NBER Working Papers
12484, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
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