Emigrants’ visit home and remittance inflows nexus

Abstract

Immigrants have created better living standards by emigrating, and they also contribute to their homeland in one of two ways: by visiting as tourists or by sending remittances back home. In this paper, we examine the nexus between these two crucial channels: remittance inflows and emigrants' visits home. We model the emigrants' visits back home and show that remittances inflows per emigrant have a strong impact on emigrants' visits home. However, the relationship is mixed among different regions. For emigrants from Africa and Latin America and Asia, the remittances have a negative impact on home visits, indicating that emigrants send more money and skip visiting their homes subsequently. For emigrants from MENA, there is a significant positive impact of the remittance inflows on home visits.