Econometric Models for Forecasting Remittances of Bangladesh

Abstract

At present, the remittance of Bangladesh (RB) is the largest source of foreign exchange earning of the country. The RB plays a critical role in alleviating the foreign-exchange constraint and supporting the balance of payments, enabling imports of capital goods and raw materials for industrial development. Remittance from overseas migrant workers certainly increases the income disparity between classes of the rural society. Therefore forecasting plays an important role to know the future situation of economic condition. This paper employed the prospective data on RB to derive a unique and suitable forecasting model. The data were collected from Bangladesh Bank (BB) during January, 1998 to December, 2003. The Autoregressive Integrated Moving Average (ARIMA) and the Generalized Autoregressive Conditional Heteroscedasticity (GARCH) models were used to find out the best one. The findings indicated that the ARIMA (0,1,1) (0,2,1)12 and the GARCH (2,1) models were appropriate for our data and the GARCH (2,1) model appeared to be the best one between these.