Massimo Cirasino is the manager of the financial infrastructure and remittances service line at the World Bank.
Small traces a genealogy of how this phenomenon has shifted through changing remittance forms and transfer infrastructures, from material and black market to formal bank and money services.
There is abundant evidence that remittances, either in the form of collective remittances sent by hometown associations (HTAs) or individual remittances, improve local and social infrastructure in the recipient communities (Aparicio & Meseguer, 2012; Burgess, 2005; Iskander, 2010; Orozco, 2003).
In sum, these articles elucidate the complex relationship between the social infrastructure of transnational connections, remittances and their political implications.
In the future, companies plan to step up the infrastructure that would support remittances to India and provide online financial solutions for the country's unbanked population.
This could become foundational crypto infrastructure for asset exchanges, remittances, and the denomination of forward-looking contracts used in insurance and prediction markets.
In the article "Homeward bond" (Views, March 16), two senior officials of the World Bank, Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala and Dilip Ratha, argue at length that African migrants around the globe could create a better future for their homeland if they would be prepared to invest their savings, through diaspora bonds and remittances, in Africa's agriculture and supporting infrastructure.
As well as paying school fees and medical bills, African remittances are opening businesses and investing in small infrastructure projects.
Solid infrastructure could do away with the large remittance fees that pose an obstacle to families pulling themselves out of poverty.
Ms. Tornea denied that the national and local governments had become dependent on remittances, saying that overseas workers' contributions to building public infrastructure were simply "payback" because they did not pay income taxes.
