International remittances, poverty and growth into WAEMU countries: evidence from panel cointegration approach

This paper applies the panel unit root, panel cointegration and panel vector error-correction Granger causality tests in a panel of the eight West African Economic and Monetary Union (WAEMU) countries and shows that in the short-run, there is evidence of (i) a bidirectional causal relationship between economic growth and poverty; (ii) a unidirectional causal relationship from remittances to poverty; and (iii) a unidirectional causal relationship from economic growth to remittances. Our results further suggest that in the long-run, both economic growth and remittances jointly Granger-cause poverty and that it takes more than fifteen years for poverty to converge to its long-run equilibrium in response to changes in economic growth and remittances.