This paper analyses the impact of international remittances on household spending behaviour in the Bangladesh context. The total household spending has been classified into seven categories, namely education, health, food, consumed and durable goods, housing and land, investment and 'other consumption'. For addressing the self-selection bias, we applied the propensity score matching technique. Moreover, to analyse the impact of remittances on the marginal spending behaviour we applied the Working-Leser (WL) model. Findings from the study reveal that remittances have positive and significant impact on the amount spent on almost all the spending categories except education, and investment. In terms of budgetary shares of different spending categories, households receiving remittances spend a lower fraction of their total spending on food and investment. Although the impact of remittances is positive and significant for the budget shares of health, housing and land, it is found to be insignificant for education and consumed and durables goods.

The frequency and intensity of natural disasters have been increasing over time and will continue to accelerate due to environmental degradation and global warming (FAO, 2015;Hallegatte & Przyluski, 2014;Thomas & López, 2015; World Bank, 2013). Natural disasters affect low-income countries more adversely than high-income or middle-income countries largely because of their poor infrastructure and institutions, which limit their ability to manage and withstand natural disasters. Moreover, since low-income countries are generally less diversified than their high-income counterparts, their post-shock economic resilience is relatively low (Laframboise & Loko, 2012). At the micro level, natural disasters are

This article identifies the nature of gendered digital divides between male and female youth (aged 15–29) in the context of Bangladesh. As a measuring indicator for technology inclusiveness, this study examines whether a young male or female owns a mobile phone, the most basic means of accessing the Internet. As observed in the descriptive analysis, on average, 46% of young females have a mobile phone, compared to 79% young males. However, such disparity varies across age cohorts and the divides of rural–urban, poor–non-poor, richer–poorer income deciles, etc. To understand whether there is any significant discrimination against women in terms of technology inclusiveness, this study applies the Blinder–Oaxaca (B–O) decomposition technique. The decomposition analysis shows statistically significant discrimination against women in terms of mobile ownership at both the household and the individual level. The factors such as remittances, average years of schooling of the household members, urban residence, household’s income status, etc., significantly reduce discriminatory behaviour towards young females. JEL: D63, O33, I21

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In conventional economics, two types of macroeconomic policy i.e. fiscal policy and monetary policy are used to streamline the business cycle. This paper has examined the cyclical behavior of these variables over the business cycle of Bangladesh. The objective of this examination is to show whether policies (fiscal policy and monetary policy) in Bangladesh are taken with a motive to stabilize the economy or only to promote economic growth. In other words, it has examined whether the policies in Bangladesh are procyclical or countercyclical or acyclical. Hodrick Prescott (HP) filter has been used to separate the cyclical component of considered variables. Both correlation and regression-based analysis have provided that in Bangladesh government expenditure and interest rates behave procyclically, but money supply behaves acyclically over the business cycle. Besides, this paper has tried to identify the long-term as well as the short-term relationship between real GDP and the macroeconomic policy variables with the help of the Johansen cointegration test, vector error correction model (VECM), and block exogeneity Wald test. Through these analyses, this study has found that fiscal policy has a significant impact on GDP growth both in the short-run and long-run. In the case of monetary policy, although the interest rate has an impact on real output both in the short-run and long-run, the money supply has neither a short-run nor long-run effect on output growth.