The second edition of the factbook presents numbers and facts behind the stories of international migration and remittances, drawing on authoritative, publicly available data. It provides a snapshot of statistics on immigration, emigration, skilled emigration, and remittance flows for 210 countries as well as various regional and income groups.

This factbook presents numbers and facts behind the stories of international migration and remittances, drawing on authoritative, publicly available data. It provides a comprehensive picture of emigration, skilled emigration, immigration, and remittance flows for 210 countries and 15 country groups. Some interesting facts: More than 215 million people, or 3 percent of the world population, live outside their countries of birth. Current migration flows, relative to population, are weaker than those of the last decades of the nineteenth century. The volume of South-South migration (migration between developing countries) is larger than migration from the South to high-income OECD countries. International migration is dominated by voluntary migration, which is driven by economic factors. Refugees and asylum seekers made up 16.3 million, or 8 percent, of international migrants in 2010. Worldwide remittance flows are estimated to have exceeded $440 billion in 2010, of which developing countries received $325 billion. Remittances proved to be resilient during the recent global financial crisisùthey fell only 6 percent in 2009 and registered a quick recovery in 2010. The top migrant-destination country is the United States, followed by the Russian Federation, Germany, Saudi Arabia, and Canada. The top immigration countries, relative to population, include Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, Kuwait, Andorra, and the Cayman Islands.

Remittances remain a key source of funds for developing countries, far exceeding official development assistance and even foreign direct investment. Remittances have proved to be more stable than private debt and portfolio equity flows, and less volatile than official aid flows, and their annual flow can match or surpass foreign exchange reserves in many small countries. Even in large emerging markets, such as India, remittances are equivalent to at least a quarter of total foreign exchange reserves. India, China, Philippines and Mexico are the top recipients of migrant remittances. The Migration and Remittances Factbook 2016 attempts to present numbers and facts behind the stories of international migration and remittances, drawing on authoritative, publicly available data. It provides a snapshot of statistics on immigration, emigration, skilled emigration, and remittance flows for 210 countries and 15 regional and income groups. The Migration and Remittances Factbook 2016 updates the 2011 edition of the Factbook with additional data on bilateral migration and remittances and second generation diasporas, collected from various sources, including national censuses, labor force surveys, population registers, and other national sources.

Remittances sent by African migrants have become an important source of external finance for countries in the Sub-Saharan African region. In many African countries, these flows are larger than foreign direct investment and portfolio debt and equity flows. In some cases, they are similar in size to official aid from multilateral and bilateral donors. Remittance markets in Africa, however, remain less developed than other regions. The share of informal or unrecorded remittances is among the highest for Sub-Saharan African countries. Remittance costs tend to be significantly higher in Africa both for sending remittances from outside the region and for within-Africa (South-South) remittance corridors. At the same time, the remittance landscape in Africa is rapidly changing with the introduction of new remittance technologies, in particular mobile money transfers and branchless banking. This book presents findings of surveys of remittance service providers conducted in eight Sub-Saharan African countries and in three key destination countries. It looks at issues relating to costs, competition, innovation and regulation, and discusses policy options for leveraging remittances for development in Africa.

During the 2008 financial crisis, the possible changes in remittance-sending behavior and potential avenues to alleviate a probable decline in remittance flows became concerns. This book brings together a wide array of studies from around the world focusing on the recent trends in remittance flows. The authors have gathered a select group of researchers from academic, practitioner and policy making bodies. Thus the book can be seen as a conversation between the different stakeholders involved in or affected by remittance flows globally. The book is a first-of-its-kind attempt to analyze the effects of an ongoing crisis on remittance flows globally. Data analyzed by the book reveals three trends. First, The more diversified the destinations and the labour markets for migrants the more resilient are the remittances sent by migrants. Second, the lower the barriers to labor mobility, the stronger the link between remittances and economic cycles in that corridor. And third, as remittances proved to be relatively resilient in comparison to private capital flows, many remittance-dependent countries became even more dependent on remittance inflows for meeting external financing needs. There are several reasons for migration and remittances to be relatively resilient to the crisis. First, remittances are sent by the stock (cumulative flows) of migrants, not only by the recent arrivals (in fact, recent arrivals often do not remit as regularly as they must establish themselves in their new homes). Second, contrary to expectations, return migration did not take place as expected even as the financial crisis reduced employment opportunities in the US and Europe. Third, in addition to the persistence of migrant stocks that lent persistence to remittance flows, existing migrants often absorbed income shocks and continued to send money home. Fourth, if some migrants did return or had the intention to return, they tended to take their savings back to their country of origin. Finally, exchange rate movements during the crisis caused unexpected changes in remittance behavior: as local currencies of many remittance recipient countries depreciated sharply against the US dollar, they produced a sale effect on remittance behavior of migrants in the US and other destination countries.

In the past two decades, changes in the Mexican government's policies toward the 30 million Mexican migrants living in the US highlight the importance of the Mexican diaspora in both countries given its size, its economic power and its growing political participation across borders. This work examines how the Mexican government's assessment of the possibilities and consequences of implementing certain emigration policies from 1848 to 2010 has been tied to changes in the bilateral relationship, which remains a key factor in Mexico's current development of strategies and policies in relation to migrants in the United States. Understanding this dynamic gives an insight into the stated and unstated objectives of Mexico's recent activism in defending migrants' rights and engaging the diaspora, the continuing linkage between Mexican migration policies and shifts in the US-Mexico relationship, and the limits and possibilities for expanding shared mechanisms for the management of migration within the NAFTA framework.

The economic literature on international migration interests policymakers as well as academics throughout the social sciences. These volumes, the first of a new subseries in the Handbooks in Economics, describe and analyze scholarship created since the inception of serious attention began in the late 1970s. This literature appears in the general economics journals, in various field journals in economics (especially, but not exclusively, those covering labor market and human resource issues), in interdisciplinary immigration journals, and in papers by economists published in journals associated with history, sociology, political science, demography, and linguistics, among others. - Covers a range of topics from labor market outcomes and fiscal consequences to the effects of international migration on the level and distribution of income – and everything in between. - Encompasses a wide range of topics related to migration and is multidisciplinary in some aspects, which is crucial on the topic of migration - Appeals to a large community of scholars interested in this topic and for whom no overviews or summaries exist