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Remittance flows appear to be falling worldwide for the first time in decades as a result of the ongoing financial turmoil. It is suspected that the drop in remittance income into developing and emerging markets will have a destabilizing effect on these economies. The paper estimates the impact of remittances on output stability for countries that are dependent on these income flows. Using a sample of 70 countries, including 16 advanced economies and 54 developing countries, we find robust evidence that remittances have a negative effect on output growth volatility of recipient countries. This

This article reviews the economic literature on social remittances. Unlike financial remittances, which are flows of cash or goods sent by migrants to their origin countries, social remittances refer to economic, social, political attitudes, behaviours and norms that are transmitted through migration. Although economists are newcomers to this literature, they have contributed to advancing knowledge on the causal effects of migration on social remittances. The evidence reviewed in this article unanimously points at the important role played by international migration in the transfer of norms. However, host countries matter greatly in explaining the types of attitudes and knowledge that are transferred back to countries of origin. Overall, there are still clear gaps in our understanding of social remittances that future research would need to address to enable us to appreciate better the mechanisms through which norms are transferred.

Remittances to developing countries were a resilient source of external financing during the recent global financial crisis. According to the World Bank, remittances from developing countries are expected to reach $436 billion by the end of 2014. Here, Holby and Leyden-Susslet examine the inflows and outflows as a percentage of GDP in Asia. All percentages are based on World Bank and IMF 2012 data. Adapted from the source document.

Untapped resources are hard to come by in the realm of international development. Migrant remittances, however, represent a relatively unexploited resource bank for developing countries. Still, researchers often debate the degree to which migrant remittances actually incite community development in practice. I rekindle the this theoretical discussion by comparing the development effects of household remittances with investments made through the remittance-channeling program 3×1 para migrantes in Guanajuato, Mexico. Regression analysis demonstrates that household remittances repress development outcomes across Guanajuato's 46 municipalities, while remittances invested through the 3×1 program have a positive effect on indicators of municipal wellbeing, including healthcare, education, and income. To my knowledge, this is the first attempt to systematically compare the development effects of household remittances with the development outcomes of remittances transferred through a government-supported program like 3×1 para migrantes. This research has meaningful implications for policy makers in migrant-sending regions around the world as well as agents of international development such as the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank.

This study investigates the impact of the Pakistan Remittance Initiative (PRI) on remittance flows to Pakistan. In 2009, the Government of Pakistan launched the PRI aimed at facilitating the flow of remittances sent home by non-resident Pakistanis. The PRI is comprised of multiple incentive schemes that are aimed at making remittance transfer faster, cheaper, and more convenient, and at increasing the attractiveness of formal channels of transfer relative to informal channels. I find that the PRI is associated with a significant increase in the formal remittances sent to Pakistan as well as a strong shift in the channels used for remit-tance transfer. Estimates suggest that while the PRI led to a significant reallocation of remittances away from the informal channel to the formal channel, it is not clear that it has increased the total amount of remittances received. ; Non-PR ; PSSP; CRP2; IFPRI1 ; DSGD; PIM ; CGIAR Research Program on Policies, Institutions, and Markets (PIM)

Young, tertiary-educated emigrants see themselves, and are seen by their home country's government, as agents of economic and social change, especially if they can be incentivized to return home. In this paper we examine the barriers that prevent this positive impact from being fully realized, taking the case of Latvia, formerly part of the Soviet Union but since 2004 a member state of the European Union. We build our analysis on data from an online questionnaire (N = 307) and from narrative interviews (N = 30) with foreign-educated Latvian students and graduates. In moving beyond remittances, we examine knowledge transfer to the home country as a form of "social remittance" and break down knowledge into two types—that which can be transferred fully and that which can be transferred only partially. We find that students and graduates do indeed see themselves as agents of change in their home country, but that the changes they want to make, and the broader imaginaries of development that they may have, are constrained by the limited scale of the market, ethnic privileging of "Latvianness," and the often nontransparent recruitment practices in Latvia. Policy should recognize and respond to various barriers that exist to knowledge transfer and return migration.