Do Emigrant’s Remittances Cause “Dutch Disease”? : The Case of Nepal and Bangladesh

Abstract

This paper examines the Dutch Disease effects of international migrant remittances by using
a vector auto-regression estimation focusing on Nepal and Bangladesh. The reason for
targeting two economies is that the differences in their economic performances could shed
light on what kinds of mechanisms make the received remittances lead to or not to the Dutch
Disease. The study identified the existence of the Dutch Disease in Nepal, but not in
Bangladesh, judging from the causalities and dynamic responses from remittances to
manufacturing-services ratio. We speculate that the contrast in the Dutch Disease effects
might come from the differences in the demand structure and policy efforts for manufacturing
development between both economies.