This article explains the importance of remittances in various countries of Latin America and the Caribbean. The impact on numerous families, culture and the economy is discussed. Various authors show the significance of remittances which account for a sizable part of these countries' economic growth. The article also explains the importance of remittances in Latin America and the Caribbean in relationship to foreign investments, tourism or other income sources.
Migration has become a very controversial topic in our present day society. Remittances on the other hand sustain migration and have become an important entity across the world, mainly Latin American and the Caribbean. This has impacted numerous families, culture and our economy at large.
The January 2004 “Report of the Inter-American Dialogue Task Force on Remittances, described remittances as the funds that migrants abroad send home to their families and communities. Today, they are the single most valuable source of new capital for Latin America and the Caribbean. The report further states that these large and still expanding transfers of resources are sent mainly by low-income residents of the United States and Canada to their mostly poor relatives in the rest of the hemisphere. The estimated sum of these transfers is astounding.
The 2003 National Survey of Latinos revealed that, across the United States some six million immigrants from Latin America now send money to their families back home on a regular basis. The number of senders and the sums they dispatched grew even when the U.S. economy slowed, and looking to the future, the growth seems likely to continue and potentially to accelerate. The total remittance flow from the United States to Latin America and the Caribbean could come close to thirty billion dollars this year, making it by far the largest single remittance channel in the world. These funds now reach large portions of the populations in the region. Eighteen percent of all adults in Mexico and twenty eight percent in El Salvador are remittance receivers, and the impact is no longer limited to the countryside or to the poor. Taken altogether these indicators suggest that the remittance traffic in the Western Hemisphere has crossed a threshold not only in magnitude but also in significance.
Van Hear explained that remittances are very important in migration since the current scale of remittances is estimated at between seventy and seventy five billion dollars a year in the early 1990’s, representing a large proportion of world financial flows, second in value only to oil among aggregate international trade and financial transaction (Russell & Teitebaum 1992).
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- Citation du texte
- Carol Benjamin (Auteur), 2005, Family Remittances and their impacts on families, culture and economy, Munich, GRIN Verlag, https://www.grin.com/document/265618