Do remittances and social assistance transfers have different impacts on household’s expenditure patterns? While two separate strands of literature have looked at how social assistance or remittances have been spent, few studies have compared them directly. Using data from a household survey...

This paper aims to understand the links between migration and poverty at the community level. Most of the research to date on the links between migration and poverty has been conducted at the micro level, while research related to migration and development more broadly usually focuses on the...

This paper poses and answers a number of critical questions about the relationship between migration and entrepreneurship in the process of economic development. In doing so, we show that the standard policy response to migrants and migrant entrepreneurs are often based on an inadequate...

Mobile remittances have a high development potential as they hold the promise of providing quick, easy and cheap money transfers. In Africa mobile phone usage has increased sharply and mobile banking providers are extending their services, enabling greater opportunities for mobile remittances....

Mobile remittances have a high development potential as they hold the promise of providing quick, easy and cheap money transfers. In Africa mobile phone usage has increased sharply and mobile banking providers are extending their services, enabling greater opportunities for mobile remittances....

Since the 1980s, the theoretical and empirical literature on the motivations to remit has grown steadily. We review the microeconomic literature and show that the theoretical motivations to remit are overlapping while competing. We argue that in most cases this differentiation is unnecessary and...

In this paper we review the current state of literature on the determinants of remittances since it is important to understand remittance flows from a policy perspective since they affect the lives of so many people around the world. While the decision to remit may be clearly linked to the...