The Global Economic Crisis and Remittances to Sub-Saharan Africa

The Global Economic Crisis (GEC) of 2008 will have its main impact on African economies through reductions in trade and financial flows. With regard to the latter, one of the single most important source of financial inflows to SSA countries is remittances. In this paper we investigate the likely impact of the crisis on the flow remittances to SSA. We use time series data covering 23 African countries over the period 1980 to 2007 and study the sensitivity of remittances to globally synchronized recessions, similar to the present.