ABSTRACT
In the general conception, remittances are financial transfers usually sent by (national or international) migrants to support relatives back home (→ Transnational Migration, I/44). Beyond monetary transfers, there are also remittances in kind (in the form of goods or services) and so-called “social remittances” (ideas, identities, practices, social capital, see Levitt 1998). Monetary remittances have grown extraordinarily since the 1990s, both worldwide and in the Americas. Although remittances to Latin America temporarily declined as a result of the U.S. financial crises in 2007–08 (→ Crisis, II/4), they recovered after 2010 and reached a new height in 2014 (Ratha, Eigen-Zucchi and Plaza 2016). Whereas the United States are by far the world’s largest sending-country since emigration from Mexico and Central America is largely concentrated there, Mexico was the fourth largest receiver of remittances (more than US$25 billion) in 2014, after India, China, and the Philippines (12). Concerning the economic relevance in relative terms, remittances in Mexico account for around 2.5 percent of the Gross Domestic Product (GDP), while in smaller countries with large diasporas, like Haiti, Honduras, and El Salvador, they summed up to more than 15 percent of the GDP in 2014 (ibid). Next to remittances from the U.S., many South American countries such as Bolivia, Ecuador or Peru receive remittances from sizable diasporas in Europe, with Spain being the most important destination country for Latin American emigrants in Europe (Ratha, Eigen-Zucchi and Plaza 2016). Globally, South-South remittances amount for a third of total remittances (11). Within Latin America, important South-South corridors of migration and remittances corridors exist between Nicaragua and Costa Rica, Haiti and the Dominican Republic, Central America and Mexico, Peru and Chile, and Paraguay and Argentina, among others (ibid). In view of the above, remittances have become an important topic in the flows of wealth from country to country. Research on remittances is often viewed from two perspectives, either by an “optimist” or “critical” view concerning their development potential.
