Research notes · Migration

How much of what migrants send home does anybody actually observe?

What the authors found

De Arcangelis, Fertig, Liang, Srouji and Yang tackle the measurement problem directly, comparing survey responses against administrative records and a transaction-logging app for the same individuals. The concern is not academic: remittance statistics underpin development policy, and if surveys and official channels miss a substantial share of what moves, the aggregate everyone cites is wrong in a direction nobody has quantified.

What our data adds

This database carries both sides of the recorded flow, and the two sides do not balance in a way worth noticing. The United States pays out 107.1 billion dollars a year, Saudi Arabia 58.7, Switzerland 42.7, Germany 26.7. On the receiving side India alone takes 150.7 billion. France appears in the top ten of receivers at 40.4 billion and also among the largest payers at 20.8 billion, which is a reminder that these lines capture transfers in both directions for any country with both an emigrant and an immigrant population. Luxembourg pays out 20.0 billion — for an economy of its size, a figure that says more about cross-border commuting than about migration.

What this cannot show

World totals of remittances received and paid do not reconcile, and nobody expects them to: countries compile them differently, informal channels appear on neither side, and some flows are recorded by the receiver but not the sender. The paper exists because the underlying measurement is unreliable, so quoting these figures to four significant digits would miss its point. Treat them as the recorded portion of an unknown whole.

The data behind it

Related notes

• If you shut a border to protect domestic workers, do their wages actually rise?
• When seven million people arrive at once, who gains and who loses?
• If firms cannot hire foreign workers for low-skill jobs, do they hire local ones instead?

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