COVID and reverse remittances: when families send money to support migrant relatives abroad

Remittances, money migrants send to family members back home, tend to fall in times of crisis in migrant-receiving economies, but that has not been the case during the COVID pandemic. Catherine E. De Vries, David Doyle, Hector Solaz, and Katerina Tertytchnaya organised three focus groups in Kyrgyzstan, the third most remittance-dependent economy in the world, just behind Tonga and Lebanon. They found that the impact of the pandemic varied across migrant employment sectors, hospitality being the worst affected. Some family members report sending money from Kyrgyzstan to their migrant members in Russia.