Reply to comment

Sanjiv, thanks for your kind words. Regarding your question, we have posted a bilateral migration matrix for 200 odd countries and three correpsonding matrices for bilateral remittance flows on our website (http://go.worldbank.org/U4RXL56V20). As you can imagine, these data are not precise. For one, a large part of the flows - of people and money - is not recorded in official statistics. For another, remittances often get attributed to the country where the headquarters of the financial intermediary are located, rather than to the actual source country. This is especially true of remittances by seafarers. So we have tried to estimate these flows using various theoretical arguments, such as that remittances are a function of the size of the migrant stock, the income level on the destination country, and the cost of living in the origin country. Such methodological details are provided in my paper on South-South migration and remittances (http://go.worldbank.org/U4RXL56V20). Let me know if you have any thoughts, or better information.