one considers its implications: with this elasticity and the observed growth rates in per capita remittances observed during the past 15 years (above 10 percent), the existing poverty level in 1990 should have been almost halved by now just because of the remittances effect.

Country specific studies, on the other hand, allow for richer analyses but may offer a narrow view of the problem at hand if the existing stock of such studies is very limited. Moreover, the comparison of results may be problematic if the analyses of the various available studies rely on diverse methodologies and assumptions, so that it is difficult to disentangle whether the observed cross country differences are due to variation in country characteristics or to methodological differences across studies.

Against this background, this paper contributes to this debate by presenting an analysis of the development impact of remittances in eleven Latin American countries: Bolivia, Dominican Republic, Ecuador, El Salvador, Guatemala, Haiti, Honduras, Mexico, Nicaragua, Paraguay and Peru. These are the countries for which the respective nationally representative household surveys contain information of the remittances received by the different households. In this regard, the paper adds to the existing literature along several dimensions.

First, our results offer a comprehensive view of the poverty impact of workers remittances in the Latin American region. In our analysis we focus on the most commonly used poverty measure -headcount poverty- and explore how the results change when one uses different poverty lines and when one moves from internationally to nationally defined poverty lines. In this regard, our analysis extends and completes that in Acosta et al. (2007). While due to data limitations we do not analyze all the countries in the region that according to Balance of Payments’ statistics receive non-trivial amounts of remittances flows, our working sample still covers more than two-thirds of the main remittances recipient countries in Latin America. This is even more important when one takes into account that Latin America is, together with East Asia and the Pacific, at the top of the ranking of remittances receiving regions in the world.

Second, unlike other studies on the topic which tend to focus either on the impact of remittances on poverty or on the impact of remittances on measures of household welfare that go beyond the pure income dimension such as education or health levels, our analysis looks at both issues. In the case of the impact of remittances on education we continue to work with eleven countries, although data limitations now prevent us from including Bolivia and instead allow us including Jamaica. In the case of health, our sample is much more limited and has only two countries: Guatemala and Nicaragua.

Third, for each of the development indicators on which we focus our analysis is based on a common methodology for all the countries so that differences in outcomes have to emerge from differences in the pattern and volume of remittances rather than from methodological biases. Thus, our results can be used to assess potential heterogeneity in the responses to a surge in remittances. To the best of our knowledge this is the first exercise of this type. In this respect, the paper brings together the virtues of cross country and country specific analysis. It has country specificity in the sense that each country is analyzed in 4