International records / African Development Bank

Working Paper 366 - Remittances and employment in family-owned firms: Evidence from Nigeria and Uganda

The link between remittance transfers and job creation in recipient communities offers a kind of private-sector led economic growth. This link has been largely ignored in migration research. Using nationally representative panel household data collected from Nigeria and Uganda, we investigate the relationship between job creation in familyowned firms and remittances. We measure remittances as a share of household income in order to capture income and substitution effects. We find that employment of family members into family-owned firms is high in households receiving small amounts of remittan…