With a little help from my friends

Abstract: Received remittances around the world has experienced a large increase during the last decades. This study investigates the effect that remittances have on economic growth, by using annual panel data from 81 countries from the last four decades. In the paper we divide our data into seven different periods to observe the long-term relationship through regression analysis. Our results indicate that remittances have a significant positive effect on the economic growth in the period in which it is received, but the study do not provide any support for economic growth caused by remittances in the previous period.