As a result of the covid-19 pandemic, Latin American and Caribbean migrants have made a greater economic effort to support their relatives in their countries of origin, revealed a study by the Center for Latin American Monetary Studies (Cemla).
The main recipients of remittances from Latin America and the Caribbean are Mexico, Guatemala, the Dominican Republic, Colombia, Honduras and El Salvador. Those six countries account for 80 percent of remittances to the region, according to the Forum on Remittances from the Americas and the Caribbean.
According to the report, the percentage of their total income that migrants send to their countries of origin went from 12.8 percent in 2017 to 18.7 percent in 2021 (latest data available) and if Mexico is excluded, that proportion in the five groups remaining migrants rose from 18.1 percent in 2017 to 24.1 percent in 2021.
These numbers reflect the fundamental aspect of remittances, which is to help compensate, albeit partially, the disadvantaged situation of the income of their relatives in their countries of origin, pointed out Jesús A. Cervantes, coordinator of the Remittance Forum.
This disadvantage, he continued, was accentuated in 2020-2021, due to the negative effects of the pandemic on the economy of individuals and households.
In general, in the countries of Latin America and the Caribbean, households that receive remittances live in small towns and in the rural sector, which is why they often work in agricultural or informal activities and have less access to public health, education, and other services. others. In addition, in recent years the economic gap between such recipient countries and the economy from which remittances are sent has widened, he explained.
According to the study, in the case of the Mexican migratory group, the percentage of income sent from the United States as remittances to their relatives in Mexico was 10.9 percent in 2017, 11.6 percent in 2018, and 15.9 percent in 2021. It is In other words, for every 100 dollars that migrants earn, they sent almost 16 dollars in 2021.
The rest, as Cemla has previously documented, is destined for food, housing, clothing, paying taxes, savings, and others.
El Salvador has doubled the amount of remittances received annually in 12 years: from 3.6 billion dollars that entered the Central American country in 2011, it reached nearly 8 billion in 2021.
The annual survey of “Hogares y Propósitos Múltiples” in El Salvador, carried out by the Ministry of Economy, revealed in 2019 that 82.5% of Salvadorans spend their remittances on consumption (food, housing), 4.7% on expenses doctors, 4.5% in education and 3.2% in savings funds.
The United States is the main remittance sender country in the world and such transfers reached the amount of 158 thousand 847 million dollars in 2018 and 200 thousand 216 million in 2021, which represented an increase in those three years of 41 thousand 369 million dollars, or 26 percent.
This increase exceeded that registered in the same period of the other nine main countries of origin of remittance shipments in the world, whose increase in such transfers in that 3-year period was 41 thousand 191 million dollars, equivalent to a variation of 16.3 percent.