Remittances revisited

Regular readers will be familiar with previous posts on the idea of remittances in general and into this province in particular. From our own government, we are still awaiting hard statistical data on the amount of money flowing into this province to replace the guesses out there now.

But in the meantime, the world marches on and the New York Times today has a piece on international remittances. They estimate international remittances at US$300billion saying:

People who track remittances have been starved for basic data. It is difficult to say exactly how much money is flowing and even harder to say where to, exactly. Sums large and small travel informally, through the mail or in the care of friends. The World Bank, the main tally keeper (in the form of a careful economist named Dilip Ratha), only counts transfers recorded by central banks. Last year’s sum came to $208 billion. Bank officials estimate that the global total is about 50 percent higher — $300 billion or more.

They also include this fascinating interactive graphic showing the money flows.

Remittances revisited

The latest CBC radio feature, The Big Commute, and the corresponding The Bond Papers post cover the issue of remittances and work-related migrations.

CBC doesn't use the word remittances specifically and prefers to deal with the grander social issues of large numbers of NLers commuting back and forth to Alberta. And well they should, too; no doubt time will show that their boomtown social problems will become our small town social problems.

Back in February I started looking at this issue and wondered at the time just how much money was coming into the province and providing support to towns which otherwise seemed to have no visible means of support.

With CBC estimating 4000-10,000 commuters making an estimated $80-120,000 per year, that means no less than $320M and possibly as much as $1.2B a year in salaries coming into the province.

At the high end, that makes commuters one of the largest group of employees (by gross salary) in the province and a source of financial inflows larger than equalization or oil revenues. It might be as high as 8.5% of the total provincial GDP which puts us not far off Bangladesh in terms of dependency on remittances.

I've pointed out before that government seemed indifferent to the issue; it's nice to see that government has taken to looking into the issue. Let's see what information comes out.

Remittances: Home and abroad

A good friend sent this along from the ITAR-TASS news service:

Moldova ranks world’s second by migrants’ money transfers
31.07.2007, 20.55

CHISINAU, July 31 (Itar-Tass) -- Moldovan labor migrants annually send $854 million to their families in the homeland, which makes up 27% of Moldova’s GDP, says a report entitled “Moldova – Migration Problems.”

Moldova ranks the world’s second after the African state of Togo by that parameter, the report runs.

The share of money transfers from abroad in the Moldovan GDP has grown from 8% to 27% over the past seven years.

In the opinion of experts of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the amount of money transfers by labor migrants will continue to grow and reach $1.4 billion by 2008.

About 500,000 Moldovan citizens (nearly one-third of able-bodied people) have had to seek employment abroad. Fifty-seven percent of the labor migrants are working in Russia. The rest have found jobs in Italy, Portugal, Greece and other European countries.

I have already noted the issue of parts of this province's economy being kept afloat by remittances. The Stephenville area, and I suspect large parts of the Burin peninsula, would have families in true dire straits if it were not for the money sent home by their men working out west.

And there still seems to be no research into the scale and impact of these money flows. I guess there are no votes in that kind of expense.