In this podcast, produced by the Development Policy Center at Australian National University, Tim Ogden discusses a necessary new lens for research on migration and household finances, based on a paper co-authored with Micheal Clemens. Typically, migrant remittances have been treated as windfall income by policy makers and researchers. However, from a family’s perspective, remittances from a relative overseas are a return on investment. Thus, migration itself is a strategy for financial management.
If policymakers and researchers adopt this new lens, by recognizing that migration allows households to achieve financial goals, and acknowledging that remittances are a return on the sacrifices households make to facilitate migration, they may arrive at more productive questions. Namely, questions about lowering the cost of this investment and facilitating its returns.
Examples of how our questions and agenda on migration change with the shift from remittances as windfall income to remittances as return on investment are also discussed in the podcast. For instance, when thinking about investment, moving from “Do migrant families become dependent on remittances?” to “Can families now earn decent income without remittances?”. As Covid-19 erases migrant worker opportunities and forces us to question the consequences of globalization, making this shift, and with it, informing better policy and innovation, is more important than ever before.