Impact of international remittances on child education in Bangladesh

Abstract

This study investigates the impact of international remittances on child educational outcomes in Bangladesh. Using three waves of data from the Bangladesh Integrated Household Survey—2011, 2015, and 2018—a probit model shows that a 1% increase in remittance receipts leads to an 8.7 percentage point higher probability of child grade progression in remittance-receiving households than in households that do not receive remittances at all. To mitigate potential endogeneity problems, we use migration networks as an instrumental variable in a 2SLS model and find that remittance increases child grade progression in all cases. This positive effect intensifies when the household is less poor, not affected by disasters, and when the migrant's length of stay abroad is more than 5 years.