Hollowing out the middle? Remittances, poverty, and income inequality in Nigeria

James T. Bang, Aniruddha Mitra, Phanindra V. Wunnava
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引用次数: 11

Abstract

ABSTRACT This paper investigates the impact of remittances on poverty and inequality in Nigeria. In contrast to the existing literature, our methodology of instrumental variable quantile regression (IVQR) explicitly demonstrates the differential marginal impact of remittances for households at different levels of the conditional expenditure distribution. In tracing this heterogeneous impact, we are further able to address the effect of remittances on poverty and inequality simultaneously in one econometric model. Our results based on the Nigerian Migration Household Survey 2009 show that remittances reduce poverty by increasing household expenditures reveal a positive marginal impact of remittances at all but the highest quantiles of the conditional distribution of household expenditure, with the impact being the greatest up to the 12th quantile. While this unambiguously supports the poverty alleviation role of remittances documented in the literature, the distributional impact is more nuanced: The marginal effect of remittances follows a U-shape over most of the household expenditure distribution, which suggests that remittances may ‘hollow out’ the middle class. Specifically, households lying between the 13th to the 35th quantile gain less from receiving remittances than households on either side of this range.
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中间挖空?尼日利亚的汇款、贫困和收入不平等
本文研究了汇款对尼日利亚贫困和不平等的影响。与现有文献相比,我们的工具变量分位数回归(IVQR)方法明确显示了不同条件支出分配水平的家庭汇款的差异边际影响。在追踪这种异质性影响的过程中,我们进一步能够在一个计量经济模型中同时解决汇款对贫困和不平等的影响。我们基于2009年尼日利亚移民家庭调查的结果表明,汇款通过增加家庭支出来减少贫困,除了家庭支出有条件分配的最高分位数外,汇款对所有人都有积极的边际影响,影响最大的是第12分位数。虽然这毫不含糊地支持了文献中记录的汇款的扶贫作用,但分配影响更为微妙:汇款的边际效应在大多数家庭支出分配中呈u形,这表明汇款可能会“掏空”中产阶级。具体而言,位于第13至35分位数之间的家庭从接收汇款中获得的收益低于位于该范围两侧的家庭。
本文章由计算机程序翻译,如有差异,请以英文原文为准。
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