From the article:
The study documenting that discrepancy came about when development economists couldn’t find any evidence that the massive surge of money from migrants was helping economic growth in their home countries. The “extremely clear implication,” one of the authors, Michael Clemens, tells Quartz, is that policymakers are “never going to increase remittances by 50% by making them cheaper. The only way to do that is that if more people are able to move and take advantage of the gigantic investment opportunity” that legal employment in a wealthy economy represents for citizens of poorer nations.
Therefore, while cutting the cost of remittances is a popular way to promote development—and, of course, matters to the people sending them—it’s more important, Clemens says, to have more people in a position to send them at all. And that is a far more controversial problem.
Read the article here
