Remesas internacionales y altruismo en el contexto de la pandemia de COVID-19

Abstract

The health crisis caused by the COVID-19 pandemic will have repercussions in all spheres of society. The pandemic’s potential effects on remittances were discouraging at the beginning of the crisis, yet the amounts of international remittances received in Mexico during the pandemic did not show the expected forecast. In an attempt to respond to the apparently unexpected trends in remittances, this article aims to discover an explanation in the theoretical foundations in the literature with respect to migrants’ motivation in sending remittances. Using a probit model and data from Mexico’s National Survey of Household Income and Expenditures (Encuesta Nacional de Ingresos y Gastos de los Hogares--ENIGH) from 2016 and 2018, the findings suggest that altruism is the primary motivation behind the behavior of remittances in the scenarios of the health crisis in the migrants’ households of origin.