Abstract

Migrant remittances have proven markedly resilient through global crises. At the same time, international financial institutions routinely invoke the notion of ‘remittance dependency’ to warn of structural distortions in states reliant on these flows. While celebrating remittance-driven increases in GDP, they simultaneously diagnose the risks of economic specialisation around labour export and advocate institutional reforms to harness and discipline remittance markets. Despite sustained reliance on migrant transfers, however, the Central Asian republics of Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan and Tajikistan have been slower than other migrant-sending states to adopt the policy prescriptions of the so-called ‘remittances-to-development’ agenda. As remittances account for a growing share of GDP relative to other sectors, this presents a puzzle: when remittances are central to economic survival, why do states not pursue stronger mechanisms to manage and institutionalise them? Moreover, does ‘remittance dependency’ reside at the level of the state alone, or should it be located within a broader set of transnational relations linking migrant households, financial infrastructures and state-bound actors?

This paper addresses this puzzle through two lines of inquiry. Firstly, it traces the emergence of remittance dependency as a policy construct among international, national and local actors, with particular attention to Central Asia. Secondly, it interrogates the normative assumptions underpinning the remittances-to-development paradigm, identifying contradictions that render a coherent regime of remittance-led development politically and institutionally illegible. Drawing on expert interviews conducted in Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan and analysis of policy documents and ‘grey’ literature, the chapter advances a situated political economy account of remittance dependency. It argues that migrant remittances in Central Asia are embedded in multiscalar power relations that connect international financial institutions, moral economies of obligation and quasi-formal networks, thereby exposing the limits of state-centred accounts of dependency.