The Multilateral Invest-ment Fund (MIF) of the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) is reporting that Guyana ranks second only to Haiti in terms of remittances as a percentage of GDP. Haiti’s remittances of US$1.988 billion make up 25% of that country’s GDP, the report, entitled ‘Remit-tances to Latin America and the Caribbean 2012: Differing Behaviour Across Sub-regions,’ said.
The report, which was released on April 29, noted that US$61 billion was remitted to the Latin America and the Caribbean region from the United States, Spain and Japan last year.
It said that despite the reduction of remittance flows with respect to GDP in recent years, the flows represent more than 10% of GDP for countries such as Guyana, Haiti, Honduras, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Jamaica, and Guatemala.
“On a microeconomic level, these flows represent an important source of income for the millions of families in the region that depend on these transfers, including families living in economies with higher GDPs,” the report noted.
The report said that remittance flows have contributed to a reduction in poverty within countries in the region “and has allowed many families to achieve a higher quality of life by financing the purchase of consumer goods and investments in education, health, housing, and business development.”
It noted that without this regular flow of resources sent by migrants to their families, many persons in the region would have fallen below the poverty line.
The report said that the total amount of remittances in 2012 is almost the same as the previous year when it was US$60.9 billion.
The report said that too there was stagnation in growth in 2012 in the remitting countries.
The report said that following the economic crisis, remittance inflows in the Caribbean region accelerated in 2010 with a growth rate of 8.3 per cent, attributed in large part to the unusually high volume of transfers in response to the 2010 Haiti earthquake.
