Remittances to Albania: Before and after the COVID-19 Pandemic

This paper aims to advance an understanding of the flows of remittances resulting from Albanian migration before and after coronavirus, their impact on the country’s development and ways to mitigate the effects of the pandemic and ensure resilience of remittance families in Albania. Over the years, migrants’ remittances have played an important role in the social and economic development of Albania and Albanian families. The health emergency caused by the Covid-19 pandemic is expected to reshape our economy and could be devastating for migrants too. This pandemic is expected to change the context for international migration and potentially cause a decrease in remittances from Albanian migrants. And yet, surprisingly, there is a lack of effective mechanisms, policies, and recovery paths for increasing the positive impact of remittances on the country's development. The paper suggests that the way remittances are managed is important. Based on the context of Albania, remittances can be encouraged and facilitated through developing private-public-people partnerships, lowering costs, and using them for entrepreneurial initiatives rather than consumption. The key contributions of the paper lie in extending discussions of the value of collecting data on remittances, providing a dynamic view of the multiplicity of factors behind remittances.

Effects of remittance's inflow and measuring the impact of remittances on GDP per capita growth: Application of ARCH/GARCH and logit model

This research aims to explore the dynamics of remittances and their volatility, applying the ARCH/GARCH model in the countries of the Balkans (Bosnia and Herzegovina, Macedonia, Croatia and Albania). Furthermore, the comparative aspect of remittance’s effect on the probability of GDP per capita growth using ML Logit Binary model within these countries including Serbia as well was also investigated. UN and World Bank annual aggregate data on personal remittances inflow as % of GDP and GDP per capita from 1998-2019 were used. The volatility spillover within the countries can be noticed. It means that remittance’s inflow volatility in these countries is influenced by its own ARCH and GARCH factors or own shocks. The separate results from Logit models show that the probability of GDP per capita growth as a function of remittances for the period (1998-2019 and 2007-2019 for Serbia) has been under positive significant effect only for Albania at 5% level and for Bosnia and Herzegovina at 10% level.

Editorial: The social dynamics of remittances and the pandemic

Migration is typically portrayed as an effective response to socio-economic hardship. Pushed by a lack of work at home and pulled by the promise of higher wages abroad, people relocate. When those moves succeed, migrants transfer money home (Yang, 2015). A logical, predictable system that is confirmed by evidence as well as World Bank figures noting migrants returned a record $689 billion globally in 2018; and while researchers expected the pandemic to push down wages, the decline to this point has been modest. Remittances continued apace and serve to cushion the impacts of the pandemic (Ratha et al., 2021). Nevertheless, the assumption that the decision to migrate is straight-forward misses how socially complex the processes can be, particularly during the pandemic (Pintor Sandoval and Bojorquez Luque, 2021, Marwah and Ramanayake 2021, Gupta et al., 2021).

Eritrea’s self-reliance narrative and the remittance paradox: Reflections on thirty years of retrogression

This article explores the role of remittances in Eritrea’s transnational authoritarian system. The government exercises a policy of active control over Eritrean citizens living abroad, and the country’s economy relies heavily on private remittances to ensure the subsistence of the population. This stands in stark contrast to the official doctrine of economic self-reliance, which has been hampered by an open-ended national service that can last for decades and deprives Eritrean citizens in productive age from making a living. The government also puts extreme restraints on the private sector. As a result, the livelihoods of Eritreans depend mostly on diaspora remittances. The authors take a historically contextualised approach based on empirical fieldwork in Eritrea from the 1990s to 2010 and among Eritrean diaspora communities in Europe between 2013 and 2019. We demonstrate how the government’s self-reliance approach has shifted from developing Eritrea’s human capital to securing financial support through transnational diaspora control. We conclude that in the case of Eritrea, the process of diasporisation has not triggered development and political transformation but has cemented a political and economic status quo that forces ever-growing parts of the population to leave.

Editorial

During the Pandemic, the World Bank estimations suggested that remittances globally would fall about 20 per cent. The live results show mixed reactions and IMF reports show significant resilience in some corridors. This is in line with our earlier studies and predictions. Regulations and restrictions keep remittances costs high and particularly higher in some corridors involving poorer countries. There are already calls to reduce the costs and make sending money home easier and attractive. In this issue of Remittances Review, Fernando César Costa Xavier discusses the terminology of irregular remittances with a particular reference to the Venezuelan immigrants’ money sending practices. Sena Kimm Gnangnon shows the effect of remittances inflows on public finance by examining the effect of remittances inflows on fiscal space using a sample of 109 receiving countries over the period 1980-2015. The last paper by Rodolfo García Zamora and Selene Gaspar Olvera shows that Mexican migrants’ remittances from the US had been suffering the effects of COVID-19 in April 2020.

Remittances from Mexican migrants in the United States during the time of COVID-19

Following the Great Recession of 2007-2009 in the United States, Mexican migrants’ remittances began to grow steadily in 2014 until they reached a historical level of US$36 billion in 2019. This figure was at US$4 billion in March 2020 when Mexico had been suffering the effects of COVID-19 for one month. In April, remittances from Mexican migrants in the United States dropped 28%, as their unemployment rate reached 17%. Recuperating remittance levels will depend on economic recovery policies in the United States, and on reducing unemployment for Mexican migrants in the sectors where they have the biggest presence.

Epistemic Challenges in the Studies of Remittances: Denomination and Ostensive Definition in the Exploratory Research on Informal Value Transfer System

There are certain areas of study in which researchers deal with and even create a plethora of terms. The Informal Transfer of Values Systems (IVTS) are one of these areas. There are many terms available in the lexicon of research on IVTS around the world, such as hawala, hundi, fei ch’ien, encomenderos etc. The informal remittance system, typical of Venezuelan migration, appears to be located in the grey zone between the large irregular money transfer markets and the modest, informal systems allowing money transfers to people who are struggling in their countries. That is why it is important that Venezuela’s IVTS receive a unique label. In search of an appropriate label that reflects the peculiarities of Venezuela’s IVTS, it is important to pay attention to the linguistic aspects that come with the epistemological challenges. Almost a century ago, the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein highlighted the importance of the ostensive definition to make sense of the words we use ordinarily. Without neglecting his epistemological warnings, this article argues that migration studies have advanced in expanding their own terminology, in a relatively consistent way with the Wittgensteinian linguistic approach.

Remittances Inflows and Fiscal Space in Receiving Countries

The current article contributes to the literature on the effect of remittances inflows on public finance by examining the effect of remittances inflows on fiscal space. Using a sample of 109 receiving countries over the period 1980-2015, the analysis has shown that remittances inflows contribute to the expansion of fiscal space in relatively less developed receiving countries, while in advanced economies, these capital inflows lead to a shrinking of fiscal space. The analysis has additionally revealed that countries that experience a higher economic growth consistently experience an expansionary fiscal space effect of remittances inflows.

From Passport to Pennies: Theorizing the Effects of Dual Citizenship on Migrant Remittances

Migrant remittances are critical elements of the economic development agenda in many parts of the world. Extending dual citizenship to emigrants has been suggested as government policy to encourage and stabilize migrants’ financial transfers. This essay theorizes the causal relationship between passports and pennies, or between citizenship policies and transnational economic activities, such as remittances. It reads the conceptualizations from a grounded theory study on the effects of status passages related to citizenship, as well as findings from economic sociology into the micro-economic literature on the determinants of remittances. Based on a study of India’s diasporic membership status, the Overseas Citizenship of India, the essay shows that four principal effects—the rights, identity, naturalization and good-will effect—affect various populations differently. The conceptualizations serve to generate empirically grounded hypotheses about the relationship between economic transfers and citizenship status, as well as to understand the underlying (and sometimes competing) mechanisms.

Domestic and International Remittances and Food Security in Sub-Saharan Africa

The amount of remittances to developing counties, defined as the flow of monetary and non-monetary goods, has increased globally and has surpassed the amount of money spent on foreign aid in these developing countries. The impact of remittances on households’ purchasing power has been studied; however, its link to food security status is yet to be explored. This paper quantitatively analyses the relationship between food security status (measured using the Food Insecurity Experience Scale) and the receipt of domestic/ international or both remittances on households in sub- Saharan Africa. Data are derived from the Gallup World Poll from the years 2014-2017. Multinomial logistic regression models and binary logistic regression analyses were conducted to analyze the data. Results showed that remittance recipients had significantly higher household incomes (especially if the remittance was coming internationally and domestically), lived with significantly more household members (7 or more members), and were more likely to be separated (including divorced or widowed). Households that received domestic remittances had significantly higher odds of being food insecure than households receiving no remittances. Conversely, households receiving remittances internationally or a combination of domestic and international remittances had significantly lower odds of food insecurity compared to non-receivers. This study found that receiving remittances affect the food security status of people living in SSA countries.