Sustainable Development Goals

The Stubbornly High Cost of Remittances

When migrants send money across borders to their families, it promotes economic activity and supports incomes in some of the poorest countries of the world. Annual cross-border remittances are running about US$600 billion, three quarters of which flow to low- and middle-income countries. To put that number into perspective, total development assistance worldwide is $150 billion.

Yet, despite the remarkable technological advances of recent decades, remittances remain extremely expensive. On average, the charge for sending $200―the benchmark used by authorities to evaluate cost―is $14. That is, the combination of fees (including charges from both the sender and recipient intermediaries) and the exchange rate margin typically eats up fully 7% of the amount sent. While it is less expensive to send larger amounts, the aggregate cost of sending remittances in 2017 was about US$30 billion, roughly equivalent to the total non-military foreign aid budget of the United States!

In this post, we discuss remittances, why their costs remain high, and what might be done to lower them.

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