After independence, the GCC countries relied heavily on foreign workers from fellow Arabs countries. Thus, remittances flowed from GCC to other countries in MENA. In the 1980s-1990s labor source switched to South Asia, which we econometrically verify. This deprived several MENA labor exporters...

In this paper I use a unique data set from Nicaragua to asses the behavior of persons who send money back home. I estimate a heteroskedastic Tobit with a known form of variance to estimate the correlation of the remitting decisions of migrants. Working, residing in a developed country and...

This article provides a short description of remitters in Dubai. The data comes from a remittance survey on foreign workers in the Emirate conducted in 2008. Among other findings, our results suggest that there are key differences between those remitters who live in labour camps and those living...

We investigate the responsiveness of remittances from the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries to the changes in the price of crude oil. Most of the GCC countries rank in the top 20 remitting countries in the world. We find that oil price elasticity of remittances is around 0.4. While most...

Despite being a fixture of everyday life in the Arab world, wasta, which may be thought of as special influence by members of the same group or tribe, has received little attention from social scientists. Our casual empiricism suggests that wasta is an important determinant of how economic...

Women in Muslim countries lag way behind their counterparts in non-Muslim countries in terms of participation in the labor force. Among many explanations as to why this is the case, religion, in particular, is stated to bear the responsibility. However, a vast amount of research shows that...

In this article we study the relationship between workers' remittances and fertility rate of the remittance receiving country. We identify two main channels by which remittances transfers affect fertility. First, migrants may adopt and later transmit to the household the ideas, values and...

While remittances from the GCC countries to Asia slowed down during the crisis, there is no evidence of large decreases. On the other hand, remittances to several MENA countries decreased during 2009, but the evidence for 2010 suggests a reversal of this pattern. Most of the recent labour...

We examine the effect of remittance outflows on inflation in the remitting countries. The growth of remittance outflows depresses inflation rate.