Transferts Financiers des Migrants et développement en Afrique subsaharienne

The purpose of this paper is to analyze the relationship Workers’ Remittances, poverty, and economic growth in Sub-Saharan African countries. Workers’ Remittances seem to affect the economic development of recipient countries in the same way as Official Development Aid and Foreign Direct Investment. To achieve this objective, we use the fixed effects panel regression models to determine the link between Remittances and poverty on the one hand, Remittances and growth on the other. Recourse to the instrumental variables method turned out to be better for the estimation of the poverty model, while the standard error correction method proved to be well suited for the estimation of the growth model. Empirical results reveal that, Remittances inflows do not contribute significantly to the reduction of poverty. However, it is important to note that Workers’ Remittances seem to be a key element in boosting economic growth in the same manner as investment. Thus, if decision makers allocate a substantial percentage of the fruits derived from this growth to investment in the development of human capital, physical and basic social infrastructures, it is very likely that poverty will be reduced in the long term.