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Remittances and Natural Disasters: Ex-post Response and Contribution to Ex-ante Preparedness
Jun 2009, Mohapatra, S., Joseph, G. & Ratha, D.

Do remittances help recipient households cope with disasters?

This paper analyzes remittances’ response to natural disasters, and whether they help recipient households maintain consumption expenditure in the aftermath of disasters.

The paper examines the response of migrant remittances to natural disasters for a large sample of developing countries, income groups and geographical regions. It also observes how remittances sent by migrants residing in high-income and developing countries contribute to ex-post disaster relief for the affected households in developing countries, and ex-ante preparedness against future natural disasters.

Study results indicate that remittances increase in response to natural disasters in countries that have a larger emigrant stock as a share of the home country population. Findings include:

In the period after a flood in Bangladesh in 1998, per capita household consumption was higher for households that receive remittances;
International remittance-receiving households in Burkina Faso and Ghana have houses built of concrete rather than mud and better communication facilities;
Ethiopian remittance-receiving households tend to rely on cash reserves during drought, rather than sell productive assets such as livestock.

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Publisher(s):
World Bank