The magnitude of remittance flows to Latin America exceeds the combined inflows of foreign direct investment and official development assistance to the region. Since the United States is the destination country of the vast majority of migrants from Mexico, as well as from other Latin American...

Using Mexico's 2002 wave of the Encuesta Nacional de Ingresos y Gastos de los Hogares (ENIGH), we find that international remittances raise health care expenditures. Approximately 6 pesos of every 100 peso increment in remittance income are spent on health. The sensitivity of health care...

Workers's remittances to Mexico represent one of Mexico's most important sources of foreign income, only second to petroleum sales. This paper attempts to measure the elasticity or responsiveness of healthcare use to remittances. Do remittances increase healthcare use by a large or a small...

The IDB's Integration & Trade Journal includes articles on the different aspects of integration in Latin America and the Caribbean, on hemispheric integration and, furthermore, on similar processes in other parts of the world. This issue contains the following articles: International Migration,...

This chapter offers an overview of migration and remittance flows with respect to the Latin American and Caribbean region from the colonial period to the present. Themes that cross history are highlighted as are the reversals of trends. Emphasis is given to south–south migration, to the...

Using a recent Spanish database, we show that remittances respond to cross country differences in portfolio values. This behavior suggests that immigrants are sophisticated economic optimizers who take advantage of opportunities to invest trans-nationally given the networks that immigrants are...