Personal remittances, banking sector development and economic growth in Israel: a trivariate causality test.

Abstract

The current study investigates the causal relationship between personal remittances and economic growth using Israel time series data from 1975 to 2011. In a bid to contain the omission-of-variable bias not addressed in many past studies on this topic, this study included banking sector development as a third variable in the relationship between personal remittances and economic growth to create a tri-variate causality framework. Personal remittances as a ratio of GDP, domestic credit to private sector by banks as a ratio of GDP and GDP per capita were used as proxies for personal remittances, banking sector development and economic growth respectively for the purposes of this study. It used the Johansen co-integration test to examine the existence of the long run relationship and vector error correction model (VECM) to determine the direction of causality between personal remittances, banking sector development and economic growth both in the long and short run. The findings reveal that: (1) there is a significant long run causality relationship running from GDP per capita and banking sector development towards personal remittances, (2) there is an insignificant long run causality relationship running from personal remittances and GDP per capita towards banking sector development, (3) there is no long run causality relationship running from personal remittances and banking sector development towards GDP per capita and there is no short run causality relationship between the three variables that were under study in Israel. The author therefore recommends the authorities of Israel to speed up the implementation of banking sector development and economic growth programmes in order to increase the quantity of personal remittances inflows.