Migration and Remittances: A Literature Review on Remittance Behaviour

The aim of this paper is to present in a complete way the kernel of such a production. People migrate and this decision is sometimes permanent, but there are links with the country of origin that stand up to time and distances. With respect to this, the so called economic diaspora well depicts the broad transnationalism that has established as a consequence of the increasing amount of money migrants have been sending back home. The data collected and the estimates fully agree on this positive trend but the outlines of these peculiar private capital flows are still controversial. This is due to three aspects each section of this work tries to address. The first part analyses those remittances’ features on which the results of the econometric studies are still causing discussion: stability, cyclicality and sustainability. The second one deals with the reasons why people do remit, concluding that the world is more balanced than a clear-cut division between behavioural and economic motives. Finally, the third one tries to go through the relationship between remittances and development, topic on which lots of studies have been conducted but that is still far from a comprehensive and convincing conclusion