Working Paper 185 - Remittances and the Voter Turnout in Sub-Saharan Africa: Evidence from Macro and Micro Level Data

Using both cross-country and individual level African data, this paper demonstrates that remittance inflows significantly lower the propensity to vote during national elections in Sub-Saharan Africa. This effect is robust to empirical specifications aimed at dealing with the endogeneity of remittance inflows at both country and household level data. This result adds to the literature highlighting the potential damaging effects of remittances on long term development.