Nineteenth International Conference on Interdisciplinary Social Sciences

Abstract

This study has been undertaken to investigate the impact of remittances on household poverty and inequality using OLS and Logit Models with a strictly multi-random sampling method. The result of the OLS model reveals that if the per capita international remittances increase by 1%, then it is estimated that the per capita income will increase by 0.071% and 0.059% during 2019/20 and 2020/21 respectively. In addition, a 1% increase in external remittances results in a 0.0272% and 0.025% reduction in per capita depth of poverty and a 0.0149% and 0.0145% decrease in the severity of poverty during 2019/20 and 2020/21 respectively. It is also shown that the effect of external remittances on poverty is greater than internal remittances. In terms of inequality, the result represents that remittances reduced the Gini coefficient by 2% and 7% during 2019/20 and 2020/21 respectively. Further, it is bold that COVID-19 negatively impacts the amount of received remittances by households thus resulting in a reduction in the size of the effect of remittances. Therefore, A concerted effort of effective policies and governance, and international assistance are imperative to address this prolonged problem.