Correlating international inflowing and outflowing remittances and migrants

摘要

Remittances, as money or goods that people send to families and friends, are very important social and economic phenomenon at local, national, regional and international levels. In the year 2017, total international remittances were at levels around USD 613 billion. From World Bank bilateral remittances and migration matrixes, we calculate for each country and territory its aggregated or total amount of remittances inflow (TRI) coming from the rest of the world, its total remittances outflow (TRO) extracted from that country and sent to all other countries, its total emigrant stock (TEMI) living overseas, and its total number of foreign-world immigrants (TIMM) living in that country. For each of these quantities, its highest-ranked countries follow an approximate Pareto power law distribution. Remittances and migrants flow in opposite directions, the statistical correlation R-2 between TRI and TEMI is 0.79, and between TRO and TIMM is 0.97. Both inflowing remittances per emigrant TRI/TEMI and outflowing remittances per immigrant TRO/TIMM fluctuate approximately around 3100 USD per year.