Envoi de fonds, inégalité et pauvreté au Burkina Faso

Based on the household surveys, carried out in1994_95, the present study underlines the impact of remittances on the inequality and poverty in Burkina Faso, a country again largely dependent of the emigration to neighbor countries. Firstly, whereas transfers play an important role to raise the standard of living of households, the redistribution is especially the expression of the mobilisation of a social capital. Remittances - of which about half come from Côte d'Ivoire - represent the three quarters of the whole of the transfers and relate to about a third of the households burkinabè, especially poorest - profiting more from the international transfers - and those of the rural sector managed by a woman. Secondly, the decomposition of the sources of incomes shows that, as a whole, the transfers - considered as exogenous - tend to have an equalizing effect on the household income distribution in Burkina Faso. In this respect, the simulation indicates that the nonremittance incomes raise the inequality of the total income, whereas the remittances have an opposite effect. Moreover, if the variation of wellbeing results, initially, of the changes related to the nonremittance incomes, on the one hand, the increase of remittances has a substantial impact on the wellbeing of the rural households and, on the other hand, in the cities, the incidence of the institutional redistribution on the wellbeing is quasi_identical to the importance of the remittances. Thirdly, by underlining the fruitfulness of an approach viewing the remittances as a potential substitute of home earnings, the econometric analysis shows that the impact of the remittances is to reduce the headcount poverty of the rural households of 7,2 points of percentage, the mobilization of the social capital especially affecting the poverty and the inequality of the most vulnerable - subsistence farmers and inactive people, households managed by a woman. In the towns, the ratio of poverty of the households is reduced of 3,2 points of percentage, consecutively with the remittances, in particular for the socio_economic groups traditionally most exposed - unemployed, self_employed workers. The analysis ofstochastic dominance confirms these results. In fact, the positive impact of remittances on the inequality and poverty in Burkina Faso underlines the extent of the transfers coming from Côte d'Ivoire, and, consequently, the double dependence, in the short run, of the standard of living of the populations of Burkina Faso with regard to the international transmission of the neighbor countries conjuncture, and, later on, of the capacity of accumulation of the physical and human capital with respect to external resources. (Full text in French)