The authors estimate that even if one were to assume that every dollar remitted added a dollar to the receiving country's GDP which would be a huge impact the available data on remittances would not be able to capture even a third of that effect.Third, irrespective of measurement errors and insufficient statistical methods, the effect on growth may in fact be fairly small.
For data on remittances to Latin America see Inter-American 2007, p. 7 and the World Bank (2015).
Nonetheless, data on remittances are inaccurate and information on income are not reliable: a high percentage of households report a monthly household income equal to zero Mexican pesos.
Data on remittances are indeed inaccurate and the available information does not allow distinguishing between the amounts due to labor income and transfers within the household.
If the data on remittances were available, the net loss would have been equal to the total economic loss minus the total remittances.
Unfortunately, data on remittances into Malawi is very limited and so it is not possible to measure the scale or impact of remittances from overseas workers, let alone the specific impact of remittances earned by skilled medical personnel working abroad.
Finally, over the decade since the data on remittances for this study were collected, the shortage of nurses in Australia and New Zealand has significantly worsened, leading to more active recruitment in, and greater migration of nurses from, Tonga and Samoa.
However, the impact of remittances can be evaluated, since the data set contains comprehensive information on remittances, including the amount remitted, the frequency in which remittances are received, as well as the source country.
Data on international remittances comes from the Mexican National Population Council (CONAPO), and is based on the 2010 Mexican census conducted by the Mexican National Institute of Statistics and Geography (INEGI).
This paper presents data on the remittances sent by migrant nurses to their families "back home".
