Fiscal Sustainability In Remittance Dependent Economies

We investigate the impact of remittances on public debt sustainability and detail how the traditional debt-to-GDP ratio can be modified to create a more accurate representation of debt sustainability for a country that receives significant remittance inflows. The main result is that inclusion of remittances into the traditional debt sustainability analysis alters the amount of fiscal adjustment required to place debt on a sustainable path. While preliminary, these results are indicative of how a one-size-fits-all stability analysis may be inappropriate when evaluating the stance of fiscal policy for countries with different balance of payments characteristics.

Given the large size of aggregate remittance flows (billions of dollars annually), they should be expected to have significant macroeconomic effects on the economies that receive them. This paper directly addresses the two main issues of interest to policymakers with regard to remittances--how to manage their macroeconomic effects, and how to harness their development potential--by reporting the results of the first global study of the comprehensive macroeconomic effects of remittances on recipient economies. In broad terms, the findings of this paper tend to confirm the main benefit cited in the microeconomic literature: remittances improve households' welfare by lifting families out of poverty and insuring them against income shocks. The findings also yield a number of important caveats and policy considerations, however, that have largely been overlooked. The main challenge for policymakers in countries that receive significant flows of remittances is to design policies that promote remittances and increase their benefits while mitigating adverse side effects. Getting these policy prescriptions correct early on is imperative. Globalization and the aging of developed economy populations will ensure that demand for migrant workers remains robust for years to come. Hence, the volume of remittances likely will continue to grow, and with it, the challenge of unlocking the maximum societal benefit from these transfers.

We propose a simple macroeconomic model with input-output sectoral linkages based on Acemoglu et al. (2016) to quantify how changes in aggregate demand due to additional income from household’s remittances propagates through the network of input-output linkages in Sub-Saharan African countries. We first propose two network centrality measures to assess the role of some sectors as key input providers in the economy. Then, we use these measures to quantify the effect of sectoral linkages on sectoral and total output following an increase in remittances inflows. Our empirical results suggest that the effects of remittances on recipient economies increase with the degree of linkages across sectors, which is especially prominent in the case of the financial intermediation sector. Our paper contributes to the emerging macroeconomic literature on the propagation of shocks across sectors and the implications for the whole economy.

International migration, the movement of people across international boundaries to improve economic opportunity, has enormous implications for growth and welfare in both origin and destination countries. An important benefit to developing countries is the receipt of remittances or transfers from income earned by overseas emigrants. Official data show that development countries' remittance receipts totaled 160 billion in 2004, more than twice the size of official aid. This year's edition of Global Economic Prospects focuses on remittances and migration. The bulk of the book covers remittances.

Remittances sent by African migrants have become an important source of external finance for countries in the Sub-Saharan African region. In many African countries, these flows are larger than foreign direct investment and portfolio debt and equity flows. In some cases, they are similar in size to official aid from multilateral and bilateral donors. Remittance markets in Africa, however, remain less developed than other regions. The share of informal or unrecorded remittances is among the highest for Sub-Saharan African countries. Remittance costs tend to be significantly higher in Africa both for sending remittances from outside the region and for within-Africa (South-South) remittance corridors. At the same time, the remittance landscape in Africa is rapidly changing with the introduction of new remittance technologies, in particular mobile money transfers and branchless banking. This book presents findings of surveys of remittance service providers conducted in eight Sub-Saharan African countries and in three key destination countries. It looks at issues relating to costs, competition, innovation and regulation, and discusses policy options for leveraging remittances for development in Africa.

This paper presents the DIGNAR (Debt, Investment, Growth, and Natural Resources) model, which can be used to analyze the debt sustainability and macroeconomic effects of public investment plans in resource-abundant developing countries. DIGNAR is a dynamic, stochastic model of a small open economy. It has two types of households, including poor households with no access to financial markets, and features traded and nontraded sectors as well as a natural resource sector. Public capital enters production technologies, while public investment is subject to inefficiencies and absorptive capacity constraints. The government has access to different types of debt (concessional, domestic and external commercial) and a resource fund, which can be used to finance public investment plans. The resource fund can also serve as a buffer to absorb fiscal balances for given projections of resource revenues and public investment plans. When the fund is drawn down to its minimal value, a combination of external and domestic borrowing can be used to cover the fiscal gap in the short to medium run. Fiscal adjustments through tax rates and government non-capital expenditures—which may be constrained by ceilings and floors, respectively—are then triggered to maintain debt sustainability. The paper illustrates how the model can be particularly useful to assess debt sustainability in countries that borrow against future resource revenues to scale up public investment.

During the 2008 financial crisis, the possible changes in remittance-sending behavior and potential avenues to alleviate a probable decline in remittance flows became concerns. This book brings together a wide array of studies from around the world focusing on the recent trends in remittance flows. The authors have gathered a select group of researchers from academic, practitioner and policy making bodies. Thus the book can be seen as a conversation between the different stakeholders involved in or affected by remittance flows globally. The book is a first-of-its-kind attempt to analyze the effects of an ongoing crisis on remittance flows globally. Data analyzed by the book reveals three trends. First, The more diversified the destinations and the labour markets for migrants the more resilient are the remittances sent by migrants. Second, the lower the barriers to labor mobility, the stronger the link between remittances and economic cycles in that corridor. And third, as remittances proved to be relatively resilient in comparison to private capital flows, many remittance-dependent countries became even more dependent on remittance inflows for meeting external financing needs. There are several reasons for migration and remittances to be relatively resilient to the crisis. First, remittances are sent by the stock (cumulative flows) of migrants, not only by the recent arrivals (in fact, recent arrivals often do not remit as regularly as they must establish themselves in their new homes). Second, contrary to expectations, return migration did not take place as expected even as the financial crisis reduced employment opportunities in the US and Europe. Third, in addition to the persistence of migrant stocks that lent persistence to remittance flows, existing migrants often absorbed income shocks and continued to send money home. Fourth, if some migrants did return or had the intention to return, they tended to take their savings back to their country of origin. Finally, exchange rate movements during the crisis caused unexpected changes in remittance behavior: as local currencies of many remittance recipient countries depreciated sharply against the US dollar, they produced a “sale” effect on remittance behavior of migrants in the US and other destination countries.

This publication showcases the beginnings of the People‘s Republic of China–Asian Development Bank knowledge sharing platform, its context, activities, challenges, and lessons learned. It concludes by mapping out the next steps to bring it to its strategic mission.

Migrants have long faced unwarranted constraints to sending money to family members and relatives in their home countries, among them costly fees and commissions, inconvenient formal banking hours, and inefficient domestic banking services that delay final payment to the beneficiaries. Yet such remittances are perhaps the largest source of external finance in developing countries. Officially recorded remittance flows to developing countries exceeded US$125 billion in 2004, making them the second largest source of development finance after foreign direct investment. This book demonstrates that governments in developing countries increasingly recognize the importance of remittance flows and are quickly addressing these constraints.