Despite COVID-19, remittance flows remained resilient in 2020, registering a smaller decline than previously projected. Officially recorded remittance flows to low- and middle-income countries reached $540 billion in 2020, just 1.6 percent below the 2019 total of $548 billion, according to the latest Migration and Development Brief.
The decline in recorded remittance flows in 2020 was smaller than the one during the 2009 global financial crisis (4.8 percent). It was also far lower than the fall in foreign direct investment (FDI) flows to low- and middle-income countries, which, excluding flows to China, fell by over 30 percent in 2020. As a result, remittance flows to low- and middle-income countries surpassed the sum of FDI ($259 billion) and overseas development assistance ($179 billion) in 2020.
At this online seminar, Dilip Ratha, lead author of the report on migration and remittances and head of KNOMAD, presented the report’s main points.
Date/Time:
8am-9am Friday, May 28, 2021 (Japan Standard Time)
Speaker
Lead Economist, Migration and Remittances and Head of Global Knowledge Partnership on Migration and Development (KNOMAD), World Bank
Dilip Ratha is Lead Economist, Migration and Remittances and Head of KNOMAD. He acts as a focal point for the World Bank on migration, remittances and diaspora bonds. He is a coordinator of the (G7/G20) Global Remittances Working Group. His TED Talk “The hidden force in global economics: sending money home,” has 1.4 million views. Besides migration, Dilip has worked extensively on innovative financing tools such as future-flow securitization, models for predicting sovereign ratings, and South-South FDI. He founded KNOMAD in 2013 and co-founded Migrating out of Poverty Research Consortium in 2011. He is also the brain behind African Institute for Remittances. Prior to joining the World Bank, he worked as a regional economist for Asia at Credit Agricole Indosuez, Singapore, and taught at Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad. He has been a visiting professor of economics at the University of Sussex and a senior visiting fellow at Harvard South Asia Institute. He has a Ph.D. in economics from Indian Statistical Institute. In 2008, a New York Times article about his life and work stated, “No one has done more than Dilip Ratha to make migration and its potential rewards a top-of-the-agenda concern in the world’s development ministries.” Dilip is the editor of PeopleMove blog.
Presentation material:
Resilience: COVID-19 Crisis Through Migration Lens (PDF)
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