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- Info
Remittances and inequality: A question of mitigation stage and geographic scale
| Author: |
Jones, Richard C. |
| Date: |
1998 |
| Periodical: |
Economic Geography |
| Abstract: |
Over the past decade, the benefits from economic globalization have bypassed most developing countries, and as a result international wage-labor migration has taken on new importance. The impact of remittances on migrant origins is still, however, a subject of considerable debate. Some researchers find that remittances tend to increase income inequalities, whereas others find just the opposite-even, upon occasion, when they are writing about the same place. This study offers a spatiotemporal perspective in which the stage of migration and the spatial scale at which inequalities are measured are conceptualized as controls that help explain these divergent views. I describe a case study, based on 1988 household survey data collected in central Zacatecas state, Mexico. Interfamilial inequalities are found first to decrease and then to increase as a place's migration experience deepens. Throughout this experience, however, rural incomes improve relative to urban ones, since remittances are targeted to the predominantly rural areas of origin |
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