Remittances and savings in migrant-sending countries

Abstract

Brown and Foster find that the official aggregate data on remittances, income and savings provide a highly misleading picture of the actual extent and forms of such flows and their uses. Their work indicates very little support for the remittance decay hypothesis. Instead, data demonstrate that remittance levels do not decline with length of absence away from the migrant's home country and a significant factor for migrants to remit is the accumulation of assets and investment in the home country. These findings open the way for Pacific island governments to increase and manage the flows of remittances to the benefit of their economies.