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Purpose – This paper empirically investigates the relationship between country governance quality and worker remittances from foreign countries. Because remittances can be a source of funds for economic development and smoothing economic crises in developing countries, the related topic has been a concern for policy-makers and academic researchers. This paper divides the motives of remittances into altruistic and investment motives through existing papers, and then considers the governance quality the remittance receiving country as one of the determinants of remittances. Design/methodology – Our empirical model considers whether governance quality can affect the volume of remittances, and uses altruistic and investment factors studied in the literature. To do this, a two-step approach is taken. First, the panel data are examined via pooled OLS, random effects, and Tobit estimation. Second, the paper reduces six governance indicators into one variable, Governance, using the principal component technique (PCA) for a robustness check. Findings – The main findings can be summarized as follows. The negative governance variable in the estimation results shows a lower governance quality that induces workers to send savings to their home countries. This means that a country with poor governance quality seems to have more remittance inflows from abroad. It also reveals that poor governance quality is more relevant to an altruistic motive rather than an investment motive, in general. The positive per capita GDP variable shows the investment motive for developed countries. Originality/value – Existing papers have focused on various factors related to the motives of remittances. However, governance quality effects on remittance inflows have not been fully studied so far. This paper considers governance quality in an estimation equation explicitly as one of the determinants of remittances. This area of study is needed, in theory and empirically, in order to fully understand the relationship between governance and remittances.
