The poorly paid foreign workers who manage to scrape together some spare cash to send back to their families are often the lifeblood of their home nation’s economies.

Remittances to poor countries are big business: $199 billion (£102 billion) in 2006, according to the World Bank. And that is just the tip of the iceberg, as a great deal more goes unrecorded.

Remittances are not only bigger than all foreign aid put together, they also eclipse even the flows of foreign direct investment into low-income countries, the World Bank notes. In Tonga, remittances amounted to about 31 per cent of gross domestic product in 2004. At least 25 per cent of the GDP of Moldova, Lesotho and Haiti came from migrants.

The average worker sends home £1,000 a year, yet analysts see the market as underdeveloped. Citigroup describes remittances as one of the fastest-growing instruments in the world.

The rising cashflows are the consequence of increased migration levels to industrial countries, which have approximately doubled over the past 30 years.

The World Bank estimates that a 10 per cent increase in official remittances per head now leads to a 3.5 per cent decline in the number of poor people. They are the unforeseen beneficiaries of globalisation.

Cashflow

Flows of international migrant remittances in 2006

East Asia and the Pacific: $45 billion (up 125 per cent since 2001)

Europe and Central Asia: $32 billion (149 per cent)

Latin America and the Caribbean: $53 billion (119 per cent)

Middle East and North Africa: $25 billion (64 per cent) South Asia: $36 billion (86 per cent)

Sub-Saharan Africa: $7 billion (62 per cent)

High-income OECD members: $68 billion (37 per cent)

Total world: $268 billion (83 per cent) Source: World Bank

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