ABSTRACT
Remittances are the portion of migrant workers earnings which they send home to their country of origin, often to their family. Dilip Ratha, a scholar of international migration and its relationship with global development, now a World Bank economist, influenced by his own experiences of migration and sending money back to his family and his home village of Sindhekela in Eastern India, became interested in the overall volume of remittance flows to developing countries. The UN Population Division (UNDP) reports that there were an estimated 214 million international migrants in 2010, which is equivalent to about 3.1 per cent of the world population. In United Kingdom (UK), the Department for International Development (DFID) set up and funded a scheme called send money home which provides user-friendly information for remitters. There are a number of different theories and explanations of why migrants remit. The four most common explanations are altruism, self-interest, a social contract and insurance.
