Regimes of Remittance Dependency: Global Structures and Trajectories of the Former Soviet ‘Bloc’

Böröcz, József (2014) Regimes of Remittance Dependency: Global Structures and Trajectories of the Former Soviet ‘Bloc’. Demográfia English Edition, 57 (5). pp. 5-37. ISSN 1787-940X

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Abstract

The integration of the countries of eastern and south-eastern Europe into global flows of migration has become a major issue not only in migration policy de- bates, but also in analyzing longer term social change in the region. Changes in the magnitudes of migrant remittances can be of crucial social and political importance. In this study, I link a conceptual contribution with a three-step empirical inquiry. First, I conceptualize migrant remittances as a form of external economic dependency. Next, I describe recent changes in the strength of the empirical relationship between migrant remittances as percentages of the GDP and per capita GDP for all societies of the world utilizing data from two online data sets. Employing what Charles Tilly (1984) called “variation-finding comparison,” I examine, next, the – as it turns out, quite sizable – residual variation in the relative magnitude of remittances that remains after controlling for per capita GDP, and interpret it as a marker for patterns of remittance dependency. Finally, I trace the recent trajectories of the societies that had, until one generation ago, constituted the Soviet “bloc” against the backdrop of the global distribution in remittance dependency. The data have been adopted from two sources: Estimates for migrant remittances as percentages of the GDP of their home country come from the online World Development Indicators dataset of the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development, while per capita Gross Domestic Product (GDP/cap) figures have been borrowed from economic historian Angus Maddison’s widely used population, GDP and GDP/cap dataset.

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