Remittances and Economic Growth Nexus: Empirical Evidence from Nigeria, Senegal and Togo

Remittances inflow is one of the major sources of capital flows in the world. Though developing countries and especially Sub-Saharan Africa does not have a bigger share of this capital flow, remittances is noted to be very useful in promoting household welfare and health in developing countries. What is not certain is whether or not remittances lead to economic growth. Set out to investigate the causal link between remittances and economic growth in three of the leading remittances recipients in West Africa i.e. Nigeria, Senegal and Togo, the study used Granger-causality and co-integration tests under the Vector Autoregressive Regression (VAR) framework. The time series data used here is made of an annual data from 1980-2012. It is realized from the study that there is a unidirectional causal link in Nigeria and Senegal. Remittances are found to lead to economic growth while economic growth does not lead to remittances inflows. There is however no causal link between remittances and economic growth in Togo.