Impact of Remittances on Health and Education Expenditures of Households of Kyrgyzstan

Abstract

Inflows of remittances are the key benefit that migration process can result for source countries. However, remittances are private flows of resources mostly intended for direct household support or consumption. There are several research papers conducted in this field, which found that households generally direct these resources towards consumption of mostly durable and non-durable goods. This paper have analyzed health and education expenditure of remittance receiving households and found that inflow of remittances does not have impact on human capital formation of children under 18 years of age. On the other hand, this work found interesting results on expenditure decisions of female headed and elderly members of the surveyed households. In both cases it revealed that, given the increase in their disposable incomes they are more inclined to distribute the greater share of their expenditure towards human capital formation of household members, who are 18 or younger age.