Working Paper #2012-026
Remittances provide resilience against disasters in Africa
How responsive are remittances to various disasters, both natural and
human-made? And would remittances be affected by systemic financial
crises (such as the 2008/09 financial crisis)? Using panel data on 23
Sub-Saharan African (SSA) countries over the period 1980 to 2007, we
find that remittances are slow to respond to natural disasters,
unresponsive to outbreaks of conflict, and will decline, albeit slowly,
after a global financial crisis only to the extent that the crisis
affects incomes, migration stocks, exchange rates, and the banking
system. The relative persistence of remittances suggests that it is a
good bulwark against natural disasters and global financial crises in
SSA.
- Keywords
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- remittances
- migration
- disasters
- global financial crisis
- Africa
- JEL codes
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- F24
- F22
- O55
Cite this as
APA 7th ed.Naudé, W., & Bezuidenhout, H. (2012). Remittances provide resilience against disasters in Africa (UNU-MERIT Working Paper No. 2012-026). UNU-MERIT. https://unu-merit.nl/publications/working-papers/abstract/?id=4690