Latinos sending money home: essential to Latin America

Remittances, the funds sent by foreign-based Latin American workers to their families back home (also called migradollars in Mexico where they constitute the third highest source of income after oil exports and tourism), represent one of the major economic trends shaping Latin America’s recent development. They are considerably more important than official development assistance (ODA) and equal the foreign direct investment (FDI) volume for the region. In some of the poorest countries of the hemisphere (Haiti, Guyana and Honduras, to name a few) they account for more than 10% of the GDP, and, in several Latin American countries, remittances per capita readings are higher than the GDP per capita of the poorest 40% of the population. Read more