Measuring remittances

Giuseppe De Arcangelis, Alexander Fertig, Yuna Liang, Peter Srouji and Dean Yang

Journal of Development Economics, 2023, vol. 161, issue C

Abstract: Remittances received by households from international migrants are of interest in an increasing number of microeconomic analyses. Making use of novel data, we measure misreporting of remittances sent by migrants in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) to remittance recipients in the Philippines. We obtained administrative transaction data from a sample of Filipino migrants who were clients of a popular money transfer operator (MTO). We then surveyed these migrants as well as their primary remittance recipients about the same remittance flows. Migrant-reported remittances are only 6% lower than MTO administrative records, and we cannot reject their equality. A custom smartphone app designed to facilitate migrant remittance reporting does not help raise reporting accuracy. Recipient-reported remittances are 23% lower than migrant reports on average. Recipients under-report even more when they receive remittances less frequently and when remittances make up a lower share of household income.

Keywords: Remittances; Migration; Survey methodology; Measurement (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2023
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0304387822001468
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:deveco:v:161:y:2023:i:c:s0304387822001468

DOI: 10.1016/j.jdeveco.2022.103004

Access Statistics for this article

Journal of Development Economics is currently edited by M. R. Rosenzweig

More articles in Journal of Development Economics from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().