Tip:
Highlight text to annotate it
X
We were very interested
in understanding whether inviting migrants
to a motivational seminar
on financial decision-making could have a positive impact
on their financial decision-making
and on their real financial outcomes,
like savings and remittances.
We conducted a study among Indian migrants
in Qatar, in Doha, the capital city of Qatar.
It was a very short seminar, about three hours,
conducted by a sort of financial guru.
We found that this motivational workshop had a dramatic effect
on the extent to which migrants
and their wives made decisions together.
They communicated more, they consulted more with one another,
and made decisions that were truly joint decisions
within the household.
In addition, we found that for an important subset
of these migrants, migrants
who were not saving very much initially,
the motivational seminar actually did lead them
to save more, and to send more money back home to their wives.
This is an important study, because there are hundreds
of millions of migrant workers
from developing countries working in the rich world.
We're talking about migrants from the Philippines,
from India, other parts of South Asia, Indonesia, the Americas,
from Mexico and other Latin American countries to the U.S.
And they send home tremendous amounts
of resources to their countries.
By some estimates, migrants are sending home something
in the order of 500 billion dollars a year
to developing countries.
This is a huge amount, which dwarfs the amount of foreign aid
that governments in the rich world are sending
to developing countries.
So there's a great deal of interest in trying to find ways
to both stimulate these flows of remittances
to developing countries and to channel them towards uses
that may have more of a long-term development impact.
The world needs more studies like this,
all oriented towards trying
to understand how transnational households make financial
decisions and how we can encourage these families
to use the new resources that are coming in because
of migration in ways that will enhance their long-run
economic prospects.