remittances and the informal economy abstract many developing countries are characterized by a large informal sector and are also often heavily dependent on remittance inflows from abroad we develop a general equilibrium framework to understand better the dynamic absorption of remittances in a two sector small open economy by incorporating many of the stylized features of the informal sector calibrating the model to yield a long run equilibrium consistent with sample averages for 56 developing countries for the period 1990 2014 we show that the effect of remittances depends critically on how they impinge on the recipient economy i e whether these inflows are i permanent or temporary ii associated with a collateral effect to securitize borrowing and iii exogenous or countercyclical we also identify the conditions under which remittances are associated with an expansion of the informal sector as well as the dutch disease effect

occupational choice and the process of development this paper models economic development as a process of institutional transformation by focusing on the interplay between agents occupational decisions and the distribution of wealth because of capital market imperfections poor agents choose working for a wage over self employment and wealthy agents become entrepreneurs who monitor workers only with sufficient inequality however will there be employment contracts otherwise there is either subsistence or self employment thus in static equilibrium the occupational structure depends on distribution since the latter is itself endogenous we demonstrate the robustness of this result by extending the model dynamically and studying examples in which initial wealth distributions have long run effects in one case the economy develops either widespread cottage industry self employment or factory production employment contracts depending on the initial distribution in the other example it develops into prosperity or stagnation

remittance and financial inclusion in refugee migrants inverse probability of treatment weighting using the propensity score abstractthis paper investigates the impact on remittances on financial inclusion of refugee migrants while financial inclusion is gaining traction in the humanitarian and development literature t

remittances investment and rural asset accumulation in pakistan internal and external migration can have a profound impact on rural asset accumulation in most third world countries in many african asian and latin american countries the bulk of the labor force still lives in the countryside in these countries the large difference between expected rural and urban or foreign incomes coupled with the risk reducing functions of migration causes workers to migrate either to urban centers or abroad the remittances defined as the money or goods sent home by migrant workers can have a large effect on the accumulation of assets in these rural areas for example an inflow of external remittances to rural households at the upper end of the income distribution could increase land accumulation by the rich in general terms the effect of remittances on asset accumulation in a rural third world economy depends on answers to three questions a who migrates b how much net income do migrants remit and c what are the marginal effects of these remittances on household consumption and investment because of data limitations in this article i propose to examine only the first and the third questions other researchers have addressed the second issue in the past surprisingly little attention has been focused on the question of the marginal effects of remittances on household consumption and investment in the rural third world this inattention has been due to three considerable methodological problems the first is fungibility because remittances are like any other form of cash income it is difficult to associate this income source with any particular changes in household expenditure behavior the second problem relates to the multiple round effects of remittances on the local economy for example an inflow of remittances into a rural area may lead to a surge in expenditures in housing which may in turn create new income and employment opportunities for the poor and unskilled unfortunately however few studies have

remittances and household consumption instability in developing countries this paper analyzes the impact of remittances on household consumption instability in a large panel of developing countries there are four main results first remittances significantly reduce household consumption instability second remittances play an insurance role by dampening the effects of various sources of consumption instability in developing countries natural disasters agricultural shocks discretionary fiscal policy systemic financial and banking crises and exchange rate instability third the stabilizing role played by remittances is stronger in less financially developed countries fourth the overall stabilizing effect of remittances is mitigated when remittances exceed 6 of gdp

remittances financial development and growth abstract despite the increasing importance of remittances in total international capital flows the relationship between remittances and growth has not been adequately studied this paper studies one of the links between remittances and growth in particular how local financial sector development influences a country s capacity to take advantage of remittances using a newly constructed dataset for remittances covering about 100 developing countries we find that remittances boost growth in countries with less developed financial systems by providing an alternative way to finance investment and helping overcome liquidity constraints this finding controls for the endogeneity of remittances and financial development does not depend on the particular measure of financial sector development used and is robust to a number of robustness tests including threshold estimation we also provide evidence that there could be an investment channel trough which remittances can promote growth especially when the financial sector does not meet the credit needs of the population

emigration to south africa s mines this paper presents a simultaneous econometric model of both the determinants of international migration to the south african mines and of some of the economic consequences for each of the labor supplying countries not only are the short run effects of labor withdrawal on traditional crop cultivation and the domestic wage labor markets considered but also the long term effects of savings from mine earnings invested in crops and cattle in the home countries the experiences of botswana lesotho malawi mozambique and the south african homelands are compared it is shown that emigration to the south african mines has reduced crop production in the subsistence sectors of botswana lesotho malawi and the south african homelands in the short run but the results also suggest that earnings of migrants have enhanced both crop productivity and cattle accumulation in the longer run except in lesotho excerpt

remittances from international migration a review in perspective abstract remittances the portion of international migrant workers earnings sent back from the country of employment to the country of origin have come to play a central role in the economies of labor sending countries recent research has tended to focus on enumerating the costs and benefits of remittances this paper proposes an alternative perspective and delineates the remittances system as a heuristic to clarify intermediate relationships between determinants and effects of remittances using the heuristic as a framework for review of recent literature concerning remittances the paper identifies gaps in currently available research and argues for greater focus upon the social and political consequences of remittance flows

financial development financial fragility and growth the authors study the apparent contradiction between two strands of the literature on the effects of financial intermediation on economic activity on the one hand the empirical growth literature finds a positive effect of financial depth as measured by for instance private domestic credit and liquid liabilities for example levine loayza and beck 2000 on the other hand the banking and currency crisis literature finds that monetary aggregates such as domestic credit are among the best predictors of crises and their related economic downturns for example kaminski and reinhart 1999 the authors account for these contrasting effects based on the distinction between the short and long run impacts of financial intermediation working with a panel of cross country and time series observations they estimate an encompassing model of short and long run effects using the pooled mean group estimator developed by pesaran shin and smith 1999 their conclusion from this analysis is that a positive long run relationship between financial intermediation and output growth coexists with a mostly negative short run relationship the authors further develop an explanation for these contrasting effects by relating them to recent theoretical models by linking the estimated short run effects to measures of financial fragility namely banking crises and financial volatility and by jointly analyzing the effects of financial depth and fragility in classic panel growth regressions

do remittances facilitate a sustainable current account we examine how workers remittances impact on the current account in doing so we focus on how remittances affect the sustainability rather than the size of current account balances we find that the presence of remittances makes it more likely that exports and imports are cointegrated thereby lending support to current account sustainability furthermore quantile regression analysis suggests that increased remittances are associated with a faster speed of current account adjustment towards long run equilibrium particularly for those countries characterised by already highly persistent current account balances in contrast to a literature that emphasises an adverse dutch disease impact of workers remittances on the real exchange rate in terms of reduced external competitiveness our findings suggest that remittances are actually beneficial to the current account balance

remittances finance and growth does financial development foster the impact of remittances on economic growth abstract there is no consensus in the literature regarding the long run impact of remittances on economic growth previous studies have shown that it might be related to financial development in the transfer receiving country but the direction of the link remained unclear i contribute to this literature by using a newly created index of overall financial development and two different estimation methods i measure the importance of remittances given financial development for economic growth in developing countries as there is no widely accepted measure of financial sector development i estimate an index of overall financial conditions it is created by means of an unobserved components model and used to determine the relevance of the financial sector as a transmission channel for remittances to affect economic growth i show that the more financially developed a country is the smaller the impact of remittances on economic growth remittances can foster growth but the effect is significant only at low levels of financial development this is in line with previous studies which found remittances and financial development to be substitutes however the interaction between the two factors becomes weaker once size depth and efficiency of the financial sector are taken into account my results suggest that while attracting migrants transfers can have important short run poverty alleviating advantages in the long run it might be more beneficial for governments to foster financial sector development

the shadow value of migrant remittances income and inequality in a household farm economy this article offers econometric evidence that income remittances sent home by family migrants stimulate household farm incomes indirectly by relieving credit and risk constraints on household farm production a high but unequally distributed shadow value of migrant remittances appears to reinforce an equalising direct effect of remittances on the income distribution across a sample of household farms in rural mexico

temporary emigration and welfare the case of low skilled labor this article studies the implications of temporary emigration for the welfare of a source country the framework is one of general equilibrium where the economy s stocks of both capital and labor are endogenously determined by the saving and migration decisions of optimizing agents simulations of the model suggest that for realistic values of the parameters welfare of nonmigrants of the source country is maximized when the migrants are employed abroad for a period in the range of roughly 8 12 years the ideal duration is found to be an increasing function of the international wage differential migration costs and the degree to which the rights of migrants are protected in the host country

the macroeconomic determinants of emigrant remittances abstract this paper considers the macroeconomic determinants of migrants remittances to their countries of origin in contrast to some previous analyses we find using data for egypt that both exchange rate and interest rate differentials are important in attracting remittance flows through official channels we also find that imports financed through remittance earnings have a very high income elasticity which suggests either that these imports are consumer durables and luxury goods or that they are undertaken by higher income groups

remittances and vulnerability in developing countries this paper examines how international remittances are affected by structural characteristics macroeconomic conditions and adverse shocks in recipient economies we exploit a novel rich panel data set covering bilateral remittances from 103 italian provinces to seventy nine developing countries over the period 2005 2011 we find that remittances are negatively correlated with the business cycle in recipient countries and in particular increase in response to adverse exogenous shocks such as large terms of trade declines this effect is stronger where the migrant communities have a larger share of newly arrived migrants finally we show that recipient country financial development is negatively associated with remittances suggesting that remittances help alleviate credit constraints

remittances and working poverty abstractthis article shows that the level and the predictability of remittances reduce working poverty in receiving economies through their effects on labour market dynamics it takes advantage of the new cross country dataset ilo kilm 7th edition containing information on the share of individuals working for less than us 2 per day to identify the main impacts the article proposes a novel approach to deal with the endogeneity of remittances and migration in addition the results are robust to the possible error in measuring working poverty to the potential attrition bias and to the presence of various control variables

migration remittances and capital accumulation evidence from rural mexico this paper studies the link between migration remittances and productive assets accumulation for a panel of poor rural households in mexico over the period 19972006 in a context of nancial markets imperfections migration may act as a substitute for imperfect credit and insurance provision through remittances from migrants and thus exert a positive eect on investment however it may well be the case that remittances are channelled towards increasing consumption and leisure goods exploiting within family variation and an instrumental variable strategy we show that migration indeed accelerates productive assets accumulation moreover when we look at the eect of migration on consumption of non productive assets durable goods we nd instead a negative eect our results then suggest that

remittances and financial access is there really a link and for whom evidence from mexican household data in policy discussions it has frequently been claimed that migrants remittances could function as a catalyst for financial access among receiving households this paper provides empirical evidence on this hypothesis from mexico a major receiver of remittances worldwide using the mexican family life survey panel mxfls for 2002 and 2005 the results from the fixed effects logit model show that receiving remittances is strongly correlated with the ownership of savings accounts and to a limited degree with the availability of borrowing options effects are particularly important for microfinance institutions and more important for rural households compared to urban households

innovation in complex products and system over the past 5 to 10 years empirical study has provided a much improved understanding of how innovation occurs in complex high value capital goods research has began to illustrate the specific ways in which so called complex products and systems cops are produced by firms often working together in projects and how innovation processes in cops differ from those commonly found in mass produced goods this is an important research endeavour for at least three reasons first cops play a vital part in the modern economy and wider society as the major capital goods which underpin manufacturing services trade and distribution cops play a critical role in modern industrial and economic progress as rosenberg n 1976 technological change in the machine tool industry 1840 1910 in perspectives on technology cambridge univ press cambridge rosenberg 1976 has argued capital goods are a key point of entry of new technology into the economic system second because much conventional innovation wisdom is derived from research on high volume consumer products new evidence models and concepts are needed to properly understand innovation processes in cops third at the practical levels of firm strategy and government policy a robust understanding of innovation in cops is needed to enable firms to improve their performance and to guide the policy and regulatory agencies directly involved in decision making in cops drawing from recent research the purpose of this special issue is to provide substantial new insights into the innovation dynamics of cops dealing with firm strategy capability building management practices organisational form product life cycles government policy measurements and conceptual frameworks in this introduction we argue not only that cops underpin the production of modern goods and services but that much conventional innovation wisdom derived from studies of mass produced goods e g the automobile and the semiconductor either does not apply or applies with substantial qualification to cops the aim of the issue is to put innovation in cops centre stage in the analysis of innovation part 1 of the introduction provides a definition of cops highlighting the innovation and production contrasts with mass produced commodity goods part 2 outlines key innovation issues raised by cops showing the importance of systems integration software and project management as core capabilities in the production of modern systems part 3 briefly summarises some of the key unanswered questions posed by cops while part 4 shows how each of the papers in this special issue attempt to answer some of these questions finally part 5 maps out future research directions stressing the importance of building a deeper historical perspective on cops as a key transmission mechanism for new technology within the industrial and wider economic system

remittances and financial inclusion evidence from el salvador this paper investigates the impact of remittances on financial inclusion this is an important issue given recent studies showing that financial inclusion can have significant beneficial effects on households using household level survey data for el salvador the authors examine the impact of remittances on households use of savings and credit instruments from formal financial institutions they find that although remittances have a positive impact on financial inclusion by promoting the use of deposit accounts they do not have a significant and robust effect on the demand for and use of credit from formal institutions if anything by relaxing credit constraints remittances might reduce the need for external financing from financial institutions while at the same time increasing the demand for savings instruments

brain drain in globalization a general equilibrium analysis from the sending countries perspective according to the economic literature high skilled emigration may either harm or bene t developing economies recent research highlighted several positive and negative channels through which the brain drain operates this paper aims at evaluating the relative magnitudes of various brain drain channels and quantifying their global impact on migrants sending countries for this purpose we develop a 10 region general equilibrium model of the world economy characterized by overlapping generations dynamics our ndings suggest that the short run impact of brain drain on resident human capital is extremely crucial as it affects not only the number of high skilled workers available to domestic production but also the sending economy s capacity to innovate adopt modern technologies this latter effect is particularly important in globalization where capital investments are made in places with high production ef ciencies hence despite positive feedback effects those countries facing prevalent high skilled emigration are the most candid victims to brain drain

overseas employment and remittances to a dual economy overseas employment has become more commonplace and remittances have increased in similar proportions for poor countries remittances often substantially influence domestic expenditures and real exchange rates we study overseas employment remittances and domestic underemployment in a simple general equilibrium model with a non traded good and minimum wage the influence of population growth rural productivity and family altruism are examined if remittances per migrant exceed domestic productivity then multiple equilibria may occur exhibiting high or low overseas employment we discuss how the equilibrium with highest overseas employment conditionally pareto dominates the other equilibria and analyse policy co ordination

international migration remittances and welfare in a dependent economy abstract this note extends the work of rivera batiz 1982 in an attempt to examine the role of remittances in determining the effects of migration on the welfare of the remaining residents in a small open economy producing both traded and non traded goods it is shown that if the flow of remittances exceeds a certain critical amount the remaining residents benefit from migration even if they do not receive any of the remittances themselves this is in sharp contrast with the results of the rivera batiz model in which the possibility of a gain for the non migrants is ruled out

the vulnerability of microfinance to financial turmoil evidence from the global financial crisis summary has microfinance become crisis prone like other sources of finance this paper provides empirical evidence on credit growth patterns of microfinance institutions in the early 2000s results suggest that microfinance has become vulnerable to financial turmoil in the global financial crisis credit growth dropped sharply moreover the crisis impact was more severe when institutions had been active in tapping domestic and international financial markets for funds and had operated in countries experiencing a severe post crisis recession finally we find that microcredit adopted the cyclical characteristics of credit growth in the traditional banking sector with credit booms followed by credit busts

the pricing practices of the liquor control board of ontario reconsidered of course economists are often suspicious of government declarations in this case however we think it justifiable to take them at face value we would agree with breton 1969 who took the higher mark ups levied on foreign wines as prima facie evidence that the lcbo was protecting domestic wines while acheson correctly pointed out that higher mark ups might be consistent with profit maximization and thus could not by themselves logically be taken as evidence of protectionism we wonder why a profit maximization hypothesis would not go any further than price discrimination between foreign and domestic wines surely the profit maximizing mark up on sherries is different from that on champagne or table wines so should profit maximization not imply price discrimination between these groups as well unless the costs of information regarding the elasticities of demand for types of wine are more expensive than the information on elasticity for foreign and domestic wines relative to the increased gross profits from price discrimination along either of these lines one would expect discrimination across types of wine to occur because of these inconsistencies as well as the evidence regarding the other protectionist activities of the lcbo it seems reasonable to us that the particular method of differential mark ups foreign versus domestic and the consistently higher mark ups charged for foreign wines are sufficient pieces of evidence to conclude that the motive behind the lcbo s mark up policy is protectionism not profit maximization

financial development growth and the distribution of income a paradigm is presented in which both the extent of financial intermediation and the rate of economic growth are endogenously determined financial intermediation promotes growth because it allows a higher rate of return to be earned on capital and growth in turn provides the means to implement costly financial structures thus financial intermediation and economic growth are inextricably linked in accord with the goldsmith mckinnon shaw view on economic development the model also generates a development cycle reminiscent of the kuznet hypothesis in particular in the transition from a primitive slow growing economy to a developed fast growing one a nation passes through a stage in which the distribution of wealth across the rich and poor widens

remittances and public finances evidence from oil price shocks we study the effect of inflowing remittances a major source of capital for many countries on tax revenues and tax policy instrumenting remittances with changes in the oil price interacted with a country s distance to oil producing countries we find that remittances have a large positive effect on vat revenues but no effect on income tax revenues this suggests that remittances often escape the income tax but can be taxed via consumption we further show that tax policy is responsive to shocks in incoming remittances remittances make the adoption of vat systems more likely and they lead to lower vat rates and higher income tax rates

remittances output and exchange rate regimes theory with an application to latin america immigrant remittances have a broad effect on the receiving economies we show this impact on the main macroeconomic aggregates is dependent on the policy arrangements in place that manage capital flows we look at remittance inflows in a small open economy to examine their influence on output under alternative exchange rate regimes using a simple stochastic limited participation model we are able to reproduce dynamics consistent with the empirical literature we find that the dynamics of labor inflation and output are dependent on the parameterization of the utility function and on the monetary rule governing the evolution of the interest rate and in particular with respect to the response of interest rates to exchange rate movements we find that the initial drop of output resulting from a remittances shock is similar under alternative exchange rate regimes but the subsequent recovery of output is faster and stronger under more flexible exchange rate regimes we provide suggestive empirical evidence from a panel vector autoregression specification for 17 latin american countries that corroborates our results

on the causal nexus of remittances and poverty reduction in bangladesh the aim of this article is to investigate the causal relationship between remittances and poverty reduction in bangladesh over the period 1976 to 2010 this issue is of fundamental importance for the developing economy of bangladesh we apply newly developed methods by hacker and hatemi j 2006 2012 that are based on simulations and are robust to the violation of statistical assumptions especially when the sample size is small as is the case in this article our estimation results reveal that causality nexus of poverty and remittances is bi directional we also find that the causal impact of poverty reduction on remittance is stronger than the reverse impact this finding implies that bangladeshi policy makers can influence remittances through poverty reduction in the long run

finance and the sources of growth the authors evaluate whether the level of development in the banking sector exerts a causal impact on economic growth and its sources total factor productivity growth physical capital accumulation and private saving they use 1 a pure cross country instrumental variable estimator to extract the exogenous component of banking development and 2 a new panel technique that controls for country specific effects and endogeneity they find that banks do exert a large causal impact on total factor productivity growth which feeds through to overall gdp gross domestic product growth the long run links between banking development and both capital growth and private savings are more tenuous

remittances and the use of formal and informal financial services summary while recent literature has pointed to a positive effect of migrants remittances on the financial development of receiving countries findings with respect to access to and the use of loans have been ambiguous this paper investigates the effect of remittances on the use of formal and informal financial services using mexican household data and finds positive and statistically significant effects of remittances on the ownership of savings accounts the existence of debts and on recent borrowing the fact that the effect of remittances on borrowing is driven by informal finance rather than by traditional bank loans points to deficiencies of the formal financial sector in addressing the financial needs of remittance receiving households we address methodological concerns of selection bias and reverse causality through household fixed effects and an instrumental strategy that exploits distance to train lines and labor market conditions in the us as exogenous determinants of remittances

are the direct and indirect growth effects of remittances significant development economists believe that migrant workers remittances are an important source of funds for long run growth therefore recent studies have investigated the growth effects of remittances and reached different conclusions in many such studies the growth of output is simply regressed on both remittances and the channels through which remittances affect growth thus there is no distinction between the indirect and direct growth effects of remittances and such specifications may give unreliable estimates because of the correlation between the channels and remittances in this paper we make a distinction between the indirect and direct effects of remittances our model is estimated with panel data of 40 high remittance recipient countries and a system gmm panel data estimation method

an empirical analysis of remittance flows into west african economic and monetary union a panel time series approach abstractthe article empirically analyses the motivations and long run economic outcomes of remittance inflows into the west african economic and monetary union using westerlund s 2007 ecm for panel time series and data spanning 1975 2011 the results show that there is no evidence of a long run impact of remittances on income per capita in the region the inflows seem to be motivated by investment but the money may be used to promote consumption instead this phenomenon could be characterized by information asymmetry between migrants and the recipients

do remittances lead to a public moral hazard in developing countries an empirical investigation abstract this article tests the hypothesis that in a context of bad governance remittance inflows strongly reduce public spending on education and health in receiving countries a phenomenon called the public moral hazard problem using a large sample of 86 developing countries over the period 1996 2007 and after factoring in the endogeneity of remittances the results suggest a negative impact of remittances on public spending on education and health when governance is bad in remittance dependent economies

international migration remittances and real incomes effects on the source country this article deals with the impact of remittances from emigrants on real incomes for different groups in their country of origin in a two by two model with one traded and one nontraded good it is shown that emigration does not necessarily raise the real income of the emigrants themselves if the traded good is capital intensive nonmigrant workers gain and capitalists lose whereas if it is labor intensive the outcome depends on what happens to the price of the nontraded good the result of a rise is that capitalists gain and workers lose while a fall has the opposite effect excerpt

migration remittances and agricultural productivity in china in our paper we have used the new economics of labor migration framework to trace the complex linkages that exist among migration remittances and agricultural productivity in china constraints in the operation of on farm labor and capital or insurance markets or institutions provide households with a motivation to migrate and distort on farm operations when labor leaves in our household sample the net impact of migration and remittances on maize production is negative excerpt

migration remittances and inequality estimating the net effects of migration on income distribution this paper examines the net effects of migration and remittances on income distribution potential home earnings of migrants are imputed as are the earnings of non migrants in migrant households in order to construct no migration counterfacmals to compare with the observed income distribution including remittances the earnings functions used to impute migrant home earnings are estimated from observations on non migrants in a selection corrected estimation framework which incorporates migration choice and labor force participation decisions for a sample of households in bluefields nicaragua migration and remittances increase income inequality when compared with the no migration counterfactual 1998 elsevier science b v

a theory of trickle down growth and development this paper develops a model of growth and income inequalities in the presence of imperfect capital markets and it analyses the trickle down effect of capital accumulation moral hazard with limited wealth constraints on the part of the borrowers is the source of both capital market imperfections and the emergence of persistent income inequalities three main conclusions are obtained from this model first when the rate of capital accumulation is sufficiently high the economy converges to a unique invariant wealth distribution second even though the trickle down mechanism can lead to a unique steady state distribution under laissez faire there is room for government intervention in particular redistribution of wealth from rich lenders to poor and middle class borrowers improves the production efficiency of the economy both because it brings about greater equality of opportunity and also because it accelerates the trickle down process third the process of capital accumulation initially has the effect of widening inequalities but in later stages it reduces them in other words this model can generate a kuznets curve

are remittances a substitute for credit carrying the financial burden of health shocks in national and transnational households summary this paper tests for the assumption that remittances are a substitute for credit by comparing the response to health related shocks among national and transnational households using mexican household panel data while the occurrence of serious health shocks that required hospital treatment doubled the average debt burden of exposed households compared to the control group households with nuclear family members a parent child or spouse in the us did not increase their debts due to health shocks this finding is consistent with the view that remittances respond to households demand for financing emergencies and make them less reliant on debt financing

revisiting the brain drain literature with insights from a dynamic general equilibrium world model the existing brain drain literature has found various mechanisms through which the high skilled south to north migration affects developing economies however some of the new found effects remain disputable due to limited evidence this study aimed to provide suggestive guidelines for future research by identifying the mechanisms that can generate larger economic impacts at the aggregate the analysis is based on a dynamic general equilibrium world model that is calibrated to published statistics and incorporates empirical estimates on the effects of brain drain it simulates short and long run impacts of increased brain drain on gdp per capita gni per capita and income inequality the results suggest that more studies should be conducted to further examine how the brain drain influences human capital formation and technology spillovers both have significant impacts on domestic production and national income a better understanding of different remitting patterns is also desirable to understand how to reduce inequality and promote recipients investment in productive assets

effect of remittances on poverty and financial development in sub saharan africa summary this paper assesses the effect of the steadily growing remittance flows to sub saharan africa though the region receives only a small portion of the total recorded remittances to developing countries and the volume of aid flows to sub saharan africa swamps remittances this paper finds that remittances which are a stable private transfer have a direct poverty mitigating effect and promote financial development these findings hold even after factoring in the reverse causality between remittances poverty and financial development the paper posits that formalizing such flows can serve as an effective access point for unbanked individuals and households

the impact of financial development on carbon emissions an empirical analysis in china given the complexity between china s financial development and carbon emissions this paper uses some econometric techniques including cointegration theory granger causality test variance decomposition etc to explore the influence of financial development on carbon emissions results indicate that first china s financial development acts as an important driver for carbon emissions increase which should be taken into account when carbon emissions demand is projected second the influence of financial intermediation scale on carbon emissions outweighs that of other financial development indicators but its efficiency s influence appears by far weaker although it may cause the change of carbon emissions statistically third china s stock market scale has relatively larger influence on carbon emissions but the influence of its efficiency is very limited this to some extent reflects the relatively lower liquidity in china s stock markets finally among financial development indicators china s fdi exerts the least influence on the change of carbon emissions due to its relatively smaller volume compared with gdp but it is mainly utilized in carbon intensive sectors now therefore with the increase of china s fdi in the future many efforts should be made to adapt its utilizing directions and play its positive role in promoting low carbon development