Examining the relationship between remittance flows and household businesses investment in Colombia

Abstract

This paper anlayzes the achievable relationship between remittances receipt and business ownership in Colombia. For this purpose, a bivariate probit model is estimated by using the 2009 Latin American Migration Project LAMP-COL14 database, which contains information from 1198 surveyed households and its members in topics such as gender, marital status, education level, age, labor participation, real state ownership, business experience, migration history, region of residence, i.a. Once several of these characteristics have been controlled for personal household head, household members and regions, our results suggest that surveyed households who receive money transfers from abroad are more likely to have a family business. In addition, we also find that the fact that families have their own business increases the probability of receiving remittances.