Migrant families spend more on durables than education, health, shows Analysis

FE Team | Published: February 17, 2018 22:12:57

FE Report
Remittances sent home by migrants are not spent adequately on education and health in Bangladesh, according to an analysis on Saturday.
The analysis, based on the household income and expenditure survey (HIES)-2010 of Bangladesh Bureau of Statistics (BBS), also found that the use of remittances on food consumption had declined significantly.
While remittances provide scope for increasing investment in productive sectors, recipients do not use their money in human capital formation such as education and health purposes.
The findings came from a study on 'An Analysis of Expenditure Behaviour of Remittances-receiving Households in Bangladesh: Evidence from Propensity Score Matching Method,' which was unveiled at the 3rd SANEM Annual Economists' Conference in Dhaka.
Investing remittances in human capital development can bring multiple benefits to the economy of Bangladesh through deepening technological innovation in manufacturing production process and employment generation.
The analysis showed that remittances were significantly spent on consumer durables, housing-related expenditure and other items.
The analysis was jointly prepared by Nafiz Iftekhar, Shafium Nahin Shimul, assistant professors of Institute of Health Economics at the University of Dhaka and Rezwanul Hoque, deputy director of the governor's secretariat of Bangladesh Bank.
The analysis recommended investing more in education and health sectors to increase per-capita remittances at home, which will help develop more innovative production process inside the country.
The number of migrant workers from the eastern part of the country is predominant and those regions mostly benefitted from foreign remittances.
The government should initiate pro-active policy measures to increase the number of migrant workers from the southern and western belt of the country.
If this is not controlled, more migration would take place from where the stock of migrant people is already high.
In another paper on 'Total Factor Productivity in Bangladesh: Impacts and Determinants', presented by Maruf Ahmed, research associate of Bangladesh Institute of Development Studies (BIDS), said that since the economy has been growing over 6.0 per year, it is high time to the country invests in human capital and adopts newer technologies to sustain the growth.
Strategies should be adopted to utilise Total Factor Productivity (TFP) so that Bangladesh can join the rank of upper- middle income countries at the shortest possible time, he said.
Executive director of the Centre for Policy Dialogue (CPD)Fahmida Khatun, who chaired a breakout session, said that remittances are playing a vital role in the economy.
It is necessary to invest workers' hard-earned money in productive sectors including in human resources development, she said.
While delivering a presentation, Suvajit Benerjee, PhD scholar of Santiniketan in India, said the carbon emission is increasing in India due to higher growth in exports.
His paper was on 'Carbon Emission from India and the Role of Exports: An Autoregressive Distribution Lag Analysis'
While addressing the seminar as a discussant, Kazi Iqbal, senior research fellow of the BIDS said such research would help the government make policy better.
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