Patterns of remittances of intra-European migrants: social relations and moral obligations

ABSTRACT

The importance of remittances for economic development and the maintenance of transnational social relationships have been widely discussed. Based on data from Switzerland, we analyze the roles of transnational social relations and moral obligations for the likelihood of sending remittances among intra-European migrants from Germany, Great Britain, Italy, Portugal, Serbia, and Bosnia-Herzegovina. Our data shows high levels of remitting among these groups, with migrants from South-East European countries sending remittances primarily to family and friends and migrants from Portugal and Great Britain sending remittances primarily to their own bank account. Furthermore, by using differentiated and direct measures for social relations and moral obligations, we show that strong social ties as well as moral family obligations are relevant predictors of sending remittances, beyond measures of various desires and capacities to remit usually discussed in the literature. However, these effects also vary according to social relation and remittance type. Together, the results make a strong case for the social embeddedness of remittances and the importance of including migrants from western and southern Europe in empirical research.

KEYWORDS:

• Remittances
• intra-European migration
• Switzerland
• altruism and moral obligations
• social relations

Acknowledgements

We want to thank Julia Schrödter for her indispensable contributions to the collection and preparation of the data. We are thankful for the helpful comments by Sebastian Weingartner. An earlier version of this paper was presented at the Meeting of the International Network of Analytical Sociology and the Interim Conference of The Economic Sociology Section of the Swiss Sociological Association.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

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Correction Statement

This article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

1 Basically, this is a type of mediation analysis, where the countries and the generational variables are the independent and sending remittances the dependent variables, with the particular capacity or desire to remit as mediator. (Partial) mediation by the desire or capacity occurs when the effect of an independent variable is reduced (Baron and Kenny 1986). More concretely: The baseline model is always model 3. Then, we estimated model 3 without a capacity or desire, for example income, which we call here model 3’. We then computed the relative change in the AMEs for all countries and the generational effect between model 3 and model 3’. Finally, we compared the size of the relative changes for all mediators, that is, all capacities and desires. We report those capacities and desires with the strongest reduction for each country and generational effect.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Swiss National Science Foundation Project 153136.