<incom> icts and remittances

[Geert Lovink]

(For me, the remittance story naturally fits into the larger picture of 
ICT4D. As the rich history of Western Union, est. 1864, shows, the 
telco business and sending money, info about markets and money, have 
been linked from the early days. Is more Internet, phones and 
telecenters inevitably going to mean more an even larger global 
remittance industries? Geert)

http://www.worldchanging.com/archives/004564.html

Remittances | Alex Steffen
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In some African countries, Christopher Lydon reminds us on his show 
Radio Open Source, money sent home from abroad now makes up a quarter 
of the Gross National Product. We're covered remittances before (and 
some of the innovations being tested to make helping the homeland 
easier), but this show is a fabulous introductory overview of the 
concept and the controversies:

Migrant workers will remit more than $232 billion to their families 
this year. The money migrant workers earn — harvesting produce in 
California, cleaning houses in Singapore, and tending children in 
Kuwait– is meager by the standards of the developed world, but it means 
everything for their families back home. $232 billion is twice what the 
world paid out in international aid last year; in Latin America it was 
more than aid and foreign direct investment combined. This is big 
business, and economists are just starting to take notice.

This year, the LA Times has been running a series of articles on 
remittances, calling them “The New Foreign Aid.” Policy makers like 
this line– they like to shrug off questions about the slim foreign aid 
budget by coupling those numbers with the huge sums of money that 
workers are remitting home. It’s all going to the same place, right?

Posted by Alex Steffen at June 12, 2006 04:48 PM | TrackBack