globalization migration and development the role of mexican migrant remittances in this paper we present evidence suggesting that international migrant remittances generally lead to improved developmental outcomes using a cross section of mexican municipalities in the year 2000 we show that increases in the fraction of households receiving international remittances are generally correlated with better schooling and health outcomes and with reductions in some dimensions of poverty our results take into account the likely endogeneity between migration remittances and developmental outcome variables and they suggest that measures to facilitate remittance flows are desirable

evaluating the economic impact of international remittances on developing countries using household surveys a literature review abstract this literature review covers 50 recent empirical studies of the economic impact of international remittances on the developing world that are based on household survey data it begins by reviewing the considerable methodological problems confronting economic work on international remittances and then examines the strengths and weaknesses of various economic studies of the impact of remittances in the developing world on such outcomes as poverty and inequality health and education investment and savings labour supply and participation and economic growth it finds that while international remittances generally have a positive impact on poverty and health in the developing world remittances can have negative effects on labour supply education and economic growth

migration remittances and poverty in ecuador abstractwe analyse the influence of the recent wave of migration on the incidence of poverty among stayers in ecuador we draw our data from a survey that provides detailed information on migrants the analysis reveals a significant negative effect of migration on poverty among migrant households this effect is substantially smaller than the one that we find focusing on recipient households we explore the factors that account for this divergence our analysis entails that the existing empirical evidence on the relationship between remittances and poverty does not need to be informative about the size of the direct poverty reduction potential of migration

remittances bonds and bridges remittances and social capital in burundi abstractthis study explores the effects of remittances on households structural social capital in urban burundi distinctions are made between bonding and bridging social capital referring to intra versus inter network ties of family members and friends the results demonstrate that remittance receiving households invest more in bridging social capital by participating in organisations donating time but make fewer monetary contributions compared to non receiving households remittances have mixed effects on bonding social capital receiving households give significantly less gifts to family members and friends but are more likely to send internal remittances compared to non receivers the implications of these findings for post conflict development are discussed

how important is selection experimental vs non experimental measures of the income gains from migration measuring the gain in income from migration is complicated by non random selection of migrants from the general population making it difficult to obtain an appropriate comparison group of non migrants this paper uses a migrant lottery to overcome this problem providing an experimental measure of the income gains from migration new zealand allows a quota of tongans to immigrate each year with a lottery to choose among the excess number of applicants a unique survey conducted by the authors in these two countries allows experimental estimates of the income gains from migration by comparing the incomes of migrants to those who applied to migrate but whose names were not drawn in the lottery after allowing for the effect of non compliance among some of those whose names were drawn the authors also conducted a survey of individuals who did not apply for the lottery comparing this non applicant group with the migrants enables assessment of the degree to which non experimental methods can provide an unbiased estimate of the income gains from migration they find evidence of migrants being positively selected in terms of both observed and unobserved skills as a result non experimental methods are found to overstate the gains from migration by 9 to 82 percent a good instrumental variable works best while difference in differences and bias adjusted propensity score matching also perform comparatively well

migrants and housing investments theory and evidence from nigeria the dominance of housing may reflect limitations in the menu of investment choices available to migrants in the country of origin in many developing countries individuals face relatively few savings opportunities where productive assets such as land farm assets are associated with high risks and or low rates of return housing investments offer unique advantages in that they are durable highly visible and associated with low risk and monitoring requirements however there are some important drawbacks associated with housing investments in particular where resale and rental markets for housing are not well developed migrants housing assets may be relatively illiquid and irreversible in the next section i provide some background on general patterns of investment behavior among migrants here the evidence on housing investments is discussed for a rich set of migrant sending and receiving countries in section iii i develop the conceptual framework for understanding migrants housing investment decisions section iv provides a description of the data sources section v outlines the empirical strategy in section vi i discuss the empirical findings section vii presents conclusions excerpt

remittances and household wealth after conflict a case study on urban burundi few studies have researched the use of remittances in conflict affected contexts this study analyzes unique data from burundi testing three hypotheses relative deprivation investment and insurance derived from new economics of labor migration studies employing propensity score matching results show that remittances are common among wealthier households rejecting the relative deprivation hypothesis remittances have strong effects on non productive assets such as living conditions and food security and weak effects on productive assets such as asset ownership poorer households invest mostly in non productive assets suggesting that remittances are insurance for the poor whereas wealthier households seem largely unaffected by remittances

international migration and income distribution in the philippines the author uses data on remittances from migrants to determine the effects of migration on household income and its distribution in the philippines i briefly describe the evolution of household income distribution using fies the family income and expenditure survey and the characteristics of households that receive income from migrants and those that do not i discuss the analytical framework that is used and outline the changes in incomes and inequality that emigration causes excerpt

sharing norm pressures and community remittances evidence from a natural disaster in the pacific islands abstractmigrants are often subject to social pressures to remit beyond their own households to share the benefits of migration with the wider community in their home country these are community remittances we hypothesise that community sharing norm pressures are stronger in locations with more extensive home community networks we also postulate that the responsiveness of remittances to sharing pressures is subject to diminishing returns attributable to a donor fatigue effect using customised survey data from three polynesian migrant groups in metropolitan and regional australia we estimate double hurdle regression models of community remittances to identify the effects of sharing norm pressures we exploit an exogenous cyclone shock to home country incomes affecting one sub group we find strong evidence in support of the postulated responsiveness of community remittances to location related differences in sharing norm pressures and the presence of a donor fatigue effect the policy implicatio

remittances financial development and growth abstract despite the increasing importance of remittances in total international capital flows the relationship between remittances and growth has not been adequately studied this paper studies one of the links between remittances and growth in particular how local financial sector development influences a country s capacity to take advantage of remittances using a newly constructed dataset for remittances covering about 100 developing countries we find that remittances boost growth in countries with less developed financial systems by providing an alternative way to finance investment and helping overcome liquidity constraints this finding controls for the endogeneity of remittances and financial development does not depend on the particular measure of financial sector development used and is robust to a number of robustness tests including threshold estimation we also provide evidence that there could be an investment channel trough which remittances can promote growth especially when the financial sector does not meet the credit needs of the population

remittances liquidity constraints and human capital investments in ecuador summary over the last decade ecuador has experienced a strong increase in financial transfers from migrated workers this paper investigates how remittances via trans national networks affect human capital investments through relaxing resource constraints and facilitate households in consumption smoothing by reducing vulnerability to economic shocks our results show that remittances increase school enrollment and decrease incidence of child work especially for girls and in rural areas furthermore we find that aggregate shocks are associated with increased work activities while remittances are used to finance education when households are faced with these shocks 2008 elsevier ltd all rights reserved

workers remittances and the real exchange rate a paradox of gifts abstract we test the impact of workers remittances on the real exchange rate using a panel of 13 latin american and caribbean countries the analysis reveals that workers remittances have the potential to inflict economic costs on the export sector of receiving countries by reducing its international competitiveness our findings raise concerns parallel to those raised by dutch disease or resource boom models where resource discoveries result in real exchange rate appreciation and shifting of resources from the traded to the nontraded sectors of the economy

remittances and savings from international migration theory and evidence using a matched sample abstract the central question of this paper concerns the implications of remittance flows for migrants and their origin households in the country of origin this paper represents the first attempt to present a disaggregated view of international remittance flows using a matched sample of international migrants and their origin families i investigate two types of remittances transfers to the home family and savings in the country of origin the empirical evidence provides support for the altruistic model of transfer behavior wealthier origin families tend to receive lower transfers other things being equal however remittances sent to finance origin country investments are positively associated with origin household wealth the estimation strategy addresses two common problems that arise in investigating remittance behavior omitted variable bias and the measurement of origin household resources

economic effects of migration on the left behind in cambodia abstractusing propensity score matching this study examines the effects of migration on various indicators of household wellbeing in cambodia the results indicate that migration would reduce poverty headcount rate by 3 7 percentage points and decrease the depth of poverty migration is also found to reduce by 5 10 per cent the hours worked by members left behind the impact of migration on labour participation may be however vulnerable to unobservable factors nevertheless the study suggests that important heterogeneous effects which differ from the average impact exist the analysis is conducted separately by internal and international migration

how can we act morally in a merger process a stimulation based on implicit contracts the intention of the article is to offer stakeholders affected by mergers a criterion from which moral arguments may be generated for the organization of each individual case the criterion any operation causing legitimate interests to suffer vital infringement should be avoided in a merger process a vital infringement of these interests is assumed when the merger undermines unique positive opportunities or considerable impairment in the future impossible to overcome for the person affected without an unacceptable level of difficulty therefore we mainly concentrate on implicit contracts which should be based on the principle pacta sunt servanda as well these contracts are mandatory to run an economy that produces increasingly more knowledge based goods

network effects and the dynamics of migration and inequality theory and evidence from mexico international migration is costly and initially only the middle class of the wealth distribution may have both the means and incentives to migrate which can increase inequality in the sending community however the migration networks formed lower the costs for future migrants which can in turn lower inequality this paper shows both theoretically and empirically that wealth has a nonlinear effect on migration and then examines the empirical evidence for an inverse u shaped relationship between emigration and inequality in rural sending communities in mexico after instrumenting we find that the overall impact of migration is to reduce inequality across communities with relatively high levels of past migration we also find some suggestive evidence for an inverse u shaped relationship among communities with a wider range of migration experiences

migration networks and microenterprises in mexico are migration networks associated with lower capital costs or the alleviation of capital constraints we examine these questions with data measuring access to remittance flows among small scale entrepreneurs in mexico using a survey of more than 6000 self employed workers and small firm owners located in 44 urban areas of mexico we estimate the impact of attachment to migration networks on the level of capital investment the capital output ratio sales and profits of microenterprises the impact is identified from the geographic pattern of migration from mexico driven by the completion of rail lines in the early 1900s for the full sample of firms we find that migration is associated with higher investment levels and higher profits but not higher sales the strongest effects on investment are in the categories of automobiles tools and inventories when the sample is limited to firms in high capital sectors investment sales and profits all increase with attachment to the migration networks suggesting that attachment to the migration network alleviates capital constraints in those sectors

do international migration and remittances reduce poverty in developing countries summary few studies have examined the impact of international migration and remittances on poverty in the developing world this paper fills this lacuna by constructing and analyzing a new data set on international migration remittances inequality and poverty from 71 developing countries the results show that both international migration and remittances significantly reduce the level depth and severity of poverty in the developing world after instrumenting for the possible endogeneity of international migration and controlling for various factors results suggest that on average a 10 increase in the share of international migrants in a country s population will lead to a 2 1 decline in the share of people living on less than 1 00 per person per day after instrumenting for the possible endogeneity of international remittances a similar 10 increase in per capita official international remittances will lead to a 3 5 decline in the share of people living in poverty

the roles of destination gender and household composition in explaining remittances an analysis for the dominican sierra two non exclusive hypotheses about what motivates remittances sent by dominican migrants to their rural parents in the sierra are tested a an insurance contract taken by parents with their migrant children and b an investment by migrants in potential bequests results show that the relative importance of these two motives to remit is affected by destination us vs cities in the dominican republic gender and household composition the insurance function is mainly fulfilled by female migrants to the us only when a male is the sole migrant in his household does he play the role of insurer investment by contrast is pursued by both males and females but only among those migrating to the us d 2002 elsevier science b v all rights reserved

international migration remittances and household investment evidence from philippine migrants exchange rate shocks how do households respond to overseas members economic shocks overseas filipinos in dozens of countries experienced sudden heterogeneous changes in exchange rates during the 1997 asian financial crisis appreciation of a migrant s currency against the philippine peso leads to increases in household remittances from overseas the estimated elasticity of philippine peso remittances with respect to the exchange rate is 0 60 positive migrant shocks lead to enhanced human capital accumulation and entrepreneurship in origin households child schooling and educational expenditure rise while child labour falls households also work more hours in self employment and become more likely to start relatively capital intensive household enterprises

are remittances an effective mechanism for development evidence from tajikistan 1999 2007 abstract in many remittance receiving countries evidence linking remittances to household economic stability and investment is limited using three cross sectional national surveys 1999 2003 2007 we compare remittance receiving to non remittance households in tajikistan a country highly dependent on remittances exploring household perceptions of financial security wealth and entrepreneurial activity across a period of rising remittance reliance we find that households receiving remittances are not more economically stabile wealthier or entrepreneurial than non remittance households findings highlight the importance of conceptualising remittances as a process influenced by the developmental contexts within receiving countries and question previous assumptions concerning development pathways

international migration remittances and schooling evidence from el salvador abstract we examine the effect of remittances from abroad on households schooling decisions using data for el salvador following the massive war related emigration of the 1980s remittances became a significant source of household income throughout the 1990s we use the cox proportional hazard model to examine the determinants of school attendance measuring income from a source that is uncorrelated with parental schooling remittances we find that remittances have a large significant effect on school retention we estimate that while household income net of remittances has a small though significant impact on the hazard of leaving school in rural and urban areas remittances have a much larger impact on the hazard of leaving school in urban areas the effect of remittances is at its smallest 10 times the size of the effect of other income in rural areas the effect of remittances is about 2 6 times that of other income our finding is of interest in that it suggests that subsidizing school attendance particularly in poor areas may have a large impact on school attendance and retention even if parents have low levels of schooling

do the return intentions of french migrants affect their transfer behaviour abstractthis paper investigates to what extent the return behaviour of migrants affects their transfer decisions both at the extensive and intensive margins we use a unique data set collected on migrants aged 45 70 living in france with detailed information on both return intentions at retirement and on private transfers we find that the temporary nature of migration strongly influences the pattern of transfers made by migrants the probability of remitting for either personal savings or to family members in the origin country increases by more than 10 percentage points with return plans the latter having no effect on gifts to family members living in france at the intensive margin the amount of personal savings sent to the origin country is about twice as high for migrants who intend to return

migration remittances and male and female employment patterns little is known about the labor market impacts of workers remittances despite their magnitude in countries with considerable outmigration reports that families receiving international remittances severely curtail their work efforts are fairly common in the popular press e g robert frank 2001 yet we lack rigorous analyses of how male and female labor supplies respond to increases in remittance income to either support or refute these anecdotal observations according to the neoclassical model of labor leisure choice mark r killingsworth 1983 remittances a source of nonlabor income may lift budget constraints raise reservation wages and through an income effect reduce the employment likelihood and hours worked by remittance receiving individuals the receipt of remittances is usually preceded by the out migration of working aged household members however which may induce changes in the labor supply of nonmigrating household members in order to compensate for forgone income or to defray migration related expenses distinguishing the disruptive effect from the income effect of remittance inflows is problematic as most surveys do not contain detailed information on household outmigration and remittance receipt to the extent that these two effects are expected to have opposite impacts on labor supply however we can assess which effect dominates the impact of remittances on the decision to work has been previously examined by edgard rodriguez and erwin r tiongson 2001 in manila and by edward funkhouser 1992 in managua without accounting for the endogeneity of remittances with respect to labor supply they conclude that remittances reduce employment funkhouser also finds that remittances slightly increase self employment while informative these studies focus on the decision to work and do not consider that without altering employment rates remittances may change the hours worked and or the type of work performed in the receiving economy furthermore the impact may be different on male and female labor supplies and responsiveness to remittance income may vary from rural to urban areas using data from mexico a country with a large and growing remittance inflow we address the following questions how does the employment status and hours worked by men and women vary owing to international remittances do male and female labor supplies differ across various types of employment in rural versus urban areas due to higher remittance inflows

remittances and labor force participation in mexico an analysis using propensity score matching summary about 2 5 million mexicans migrated to the united states during 1997 2002 and 1 6 million of them sent remittances to their families did recipients change their labor force status in response to these remittances this question has been examined before unlike the previous studies we separate persistent from sporadic remittances and we use propensity score matching to measure differences in behavior we find limited evidence of labor force participation effects of persistent remittances which is broadly consistent with remittances being an integral part of household s income generation strategy

what is the impact of international remittances on poverty and inequality in latin america workers remittances have become a major source of income for developing countries however little is still known about their impact on poverty and inequality using a large cross country panel dataset the authors find that remittances in latin american and caribbean lac countries have increased growth and reduced inequality and poverty these results are robust to the use of different instruments that attempt to correct for the potential endogeneity of remittances household survey based estimates for 10 lac countries confirm that remittances have negative albeit relatively small inequality and poverty reducing effects even after imputations for the potential home earnings of migrants

remittances labour supply and activity of household members left behind abstractthis paper analyses the role of remittances on labour supply and activity of household members left behind by explicitly distinguishing between different types of self employment contrary to the existing evidence we find no dependency effect of remittances our results show that remittances received by households in tajikistan decrease the probability of wage employment and increase that of small scale self employment activities of men staying behind without affecting the number of job specific hours worked any positive effect on economic development would be however limited as self employment is in rather small scale activities that do not generate a regular income stream

migration remittances and inequality estimating the net effects of migration on income distribution this paper examines the net effects of migration and remittances on income distribution potential home earnings of migrants are imputed as are the earnings of non migrants in migrant households in order to construct no migration counterfacmals to compare with the observed income distribution including remittances the earnings functions used to impute migrant home earnings are estimated from observations on non migrants in a selection corrected estimation framework which incorporates migration choice and labor force participation decisions for a sample of households in bluefields nicaragua migration and remittances increase income inequality when compared with the no migration counterfactual 1998 elsevier science b v

are remittances insurance evidence from rainfall shocks in the philippines several facts motivate this study first life in developing countries is prone to many kinds of risk such as crop and income loss due to natural disasters weather insect infestations and fire and civil conflict second international migration and remittance flows are substantial and growing between 1965 and 2000 individuals living outside their country of birth grew from 2 2 to 2 9 percent of the world population totaling 175 million people in 2000 the remittances that these migrants send to their countries of origin are an important but poorly understood type of international financial flow this article examines a mechanism for coping with shocks ex post on which previous micro level studies have not focused remittances from family members overseas at the international level it is commonly posited that remittance flows from overseas buffer economic shocks in migrants home countries but there have been relatively few empirical tests of this claim with micro level household data related research on the role of domestic migration in pooling risk within extended families includes lucas and stark 1985 rosenzweig and stark 1989 and paulson 2000

remittance receipt and business ownership in the dominican republic using household level data from the dominican communities in the latin american migration project lamp dr7 we examine the links between remittance receipt and business ownership we find that while the existence of a family business attracts remittance inflows these monetary funds are associated with a reduced likelihood of business entrepreneurship these results are consistent with various hypotheses regarding remittances and business investments first remittances may be motivated by the availability of investment opportunities in the home community second remittances may respond to a bequest motive on the part of the emigrant who may wish to lay claim on family assets when returning home lastly remittances may cause an income effect that reduces family labour force participation and correspondingly the likelihood of family run business investments

remittances household expenditure and investment in guatemala the author uses a large household data set from guatemala to analyze how the receipt of internal remittances from guatemala and international remittances from the united states affects the marginal spending behavior of households on various consumption and investment goods contrary to other studies the author finds that households receiving remittances actually spend less at the margin on consumption food and consumer goods and durables than do households receiving no remittances instead of spending on consumption households receiving remittances tend to spend more on investment goods like education health and housing the analysis shows that a large amount of remittance money goes into education at the margin households receiving internal and international remittances spend 45 and 58 percent more respectively on education than do households with no remittances these increased expenditures on education represent investment in human capital like other studies the author finds that remittance receiving households spend more at the margin on housing these increased expenditures on housing represent a type of investment for the migrant as well as a means for boosting local economic development by creating new income and employment opportunities for skilled and unskilled workers

executive budget proposal executive veto legislative override and uncertainty a comparative analysis of the budgetary process this study examines the roles of the executive budgetary proposal the executive veto the legislative override and legislative uncertainty about the executive s preferences in determining the outcome of a budgetary process a sequential model of the budgetary process with three institutional agents a legislature an appropriations committee and an executive is presented to focus attention on the executive proposal the veto the override provision and uncertainty simplifying assumptions are made 1 the appropriations committee has monopoly agenda power and 2 there is a closed amendment control rule in order to characterize sequential equilibria of various combinations of veto rules and override provisions we examine a particular arrangement of agents preferences and a two item budget the results demonstrate that the final budget depends critically on the executive proposal the executive veto rule the override provision and the uncertainty we achieve three striking results first the executive proposal may be effective in reducing the frequency of the exercised veto second for a given override provision a movement from the item veto to the item reduction veto leaves the executive worse off in some cases third with the same change in institutions the government budget may increase

remittances and working poverty abstractthis article shows that the level and the predictability of remittances reduce working poverty in receiving economies through their effects on labour market dynamics it takes advantage of the new cross country dataset ilo kilm 7th edition containing information on the share of individuals working for less than us 2 per day to identify the main impacts the article proposes a novel approach to deal with the endogeneity of remittances and migration in addition the results are robust to the possible error in measuring working poverty to the potential attrition bias and to the presence of various control variables