Remittances in the CIS: Their Economic Implications and a New Estimation Procedure

Migrant remittances are an increasingly important type of international financial flow for providing both additional resources for development as well as consumption expenditures for poverty alleviation. One geographical area where these flows are quite significant is in the CIS economies both in terms of their sheer size as well as their economic importance in providing a source of external finance for the recipient countries. Data on remittances generally, but especially in this region, are often of poor reliability due to the fact that these flows often move through unofficial and unmonitored channels. Data for the CIS are limited in that several countries do not provide this information in their balance of payment statistics and in those that do, it is often only partially reported and poorly collected or estimated. In this paper the characteristics, trends, and importance of remittances in the CIS are discussed and a new approach for estimating remittance flows in the CIS is developed based upon a new set of financial data recently released by the Central Bank of Russia and unpublished data obtained from the central banks of Kazakhstan, Moldova and Ukraine.