Emigrantes são verdadeiros heróis, em alguns países; não para o governo Bolsonaro - map of remittances (Visual Capitalist)

Em alguns países, as remessas dos seus emigrantes constituem um aporte essencial do ponto de vista social e econômico, inclusive em termos de balanço de pagamentos. 
Não é o caso de países fortemente marcados pela xenofobia e pelo desprezo pelo fenômeno essencial das migrações continentais.
O governo Bolsonaro, pela visão caolha, míope, que mantém sobre a questão da imigração, inclusive seguindo e apoiando as políticas fortemente racistas e xenófobas de certos governos (Hungria, EUA), desligou o Brasil do Pacto Global das Migrações, um instrumento essencialmente positivo para um país, como o Brasil, que tem dez vezes mais emigrantes do que imigrantes.
Paulo Roberto de Almeida

Melhor visualizar os mapas neste link: 
https://www.visualcapitalist.com/global-remittance-flows/

Mapped: The Ins and Outs of Remittance Flows

By

 Iman Ghosh

Visual Capitalist, February 12, 2020

The global immigrant population is growing at a robust pace, and their aggregate force is one to be reckoned with. In 2019, migrants collectively sent $550.5 billion in money back to their home countries—money transfer flows that are also known as remittances.

Remittances serve as an economic lifeline around the world, particularly for low- and middle-income countries (LMICs). Today’s visualization relies on the latest data from the World Bank to create a snapshot of these global remittance flows.

Where do most of these remittances come from, and which countries are the biggest recipients?

Remittances: An Origin Story

Remittances are a type of capital flow, with significant impacts on the places they wind up. These money transfers have surpassed official aid being sent to LMICs for decades, and in this day and age, are rivaling even Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) flows.

Remittance flows mainly help improve basic living standards such as housing, healthcare, and education, with leftover funds going towards other parts of the economy. They can also be a means for increasing the social mobility of family and friends back home.

Altogether, 50% of remittances are sent in either U.S. dollars, or the closely-linked currencies of Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries, such as the Saudi riyal. It’s not surprising then, that the U.S. is the biggest origin country of remittances, contributing $68.5 billion in 2018—more than double that of the next-highest country, Saudi Arabia, at $33.6 billion.

Remittance Flows As A Safety Net

The impact of remittances on LMICs can vary depending on what you measure. In absolute terms, the top 10 LMIC recipients received $350 billion, or nearly 64% of total remittances in 2019.

Top Remittance Recipients in 2019 (USD)

Rank	Country	Remittance Inflows	% of Nominal GDP
#1	🇮🇳 India	$82.2B	2.8%
#2	🇨🇳 China	$70.3B	0.5%
#3	🇲🇽 Mexico	$38.7B	3.1%
#4	🇵🇭 Philippines	$35.1B	9.8%
#5	🇪🇬 Egypt	$26.4B	8.8%
#6	🇪🇬 Nigeria	$25.4B	5.7%
#7	🇵🇰 Pakistan	$21.9B	7.9%
#8	🇧🇩 Bangladesh	$17.5B	5.5%
#9	🇻🇳 Vietnam	$16.7B	6.4%
#10	🇺🇦 Ukraine	$15.9B	11.8%

India tops the chart as the largest remittances beneficiary, followed by China and Mexico. Interestingly, these three countries are also the main destinationsof remittance flows from the U.S., but in the reverse order. Mexico and the U.S. have one of the most interconnected remittance corridors in the world.

However, the chart above makes it clear that simply counting the dollars is only one part of the picture. Despite these multi-billion dollar numbers, remittances are equal to only a fraction of these economies.

By looking at remittances as a percentage of nominal GDP, it’s clear that they can have an outsize impact on nations, even if the overall value of flows are much lower in comparison.

Top Remittance Recipients in 2019 (% of GDP)

Rank	Country	Remittance Inflows	% of Nominal GDP
#1	🇹🇴 Tonga	$0.19B	38.5%
#2	🇭🇹 Haiti	$3.3B	34.3%
#3	🇳🇵 Nepal	$8.6B	29.9%
#4	🇹🇯 Tajikistan	$2.3B	29.7%
#5	🇰🇬 Kyrgyz Republic	$2.4B	29.6%
#6	🇭🇳 Honduras	$5.3B	21.4%
#7	🇸🇻 El Salvador	$5.6B	20.8%
#8	🇰🇲 Comoros	$0.14B	19.3%
#9	🇼🇸 Samoa	$0.17B	18.4%
#10	🇵🇸 West Bank and Gaza	$2.6B	17.6%

It’s clear that the cash influxes provided by remittances are crucial to many smaller countries. Take the Polynesian archipelago of Tonga, for example: even though it only saw $190 million in remittances from abroad, that amount accounts for nearly 40% of the country’s nominal GDP.

Will The Remittance Tides Turn?

The World Bank projects remittance flows to increase to nearly $600 billion by 2021. But are such projections of future remittance flows reliable? The researchers offer two reasons why remittances may ebb and flow.

On one hand, anti-immigration sentiment across major economies could complicate this growth, as evidenced by Brexit. The good news? That doesn’t stop immigration itself from taking place. Instead, where these migrants and their money end up, are constantly in flux.

This means that as immigration steadily grows, so will remittance flows. What’s more, fintech innovations have the potential to bolster this progress, by making money transfers cheaper and easier to access.

Tackling [high transaction costs] is crucial not only for economic and social development, but also for improving financial inclusion.

—UN ESCAP, Oct 2019

Chart of the Week

Published

5 days ago

on

February 7, 2020

It’s an unfortunate truth that a person’s opportunities can be partially tethered to their socioeconomic status at birth. 

Although winning or losing the “birth lottery” will continue to shape the lives of generations to come, climbing the socioeconomic ladder is possible. However, it boils down to what opportunities people are afforded in the country they live in.

Today’s chart pulls data from the inaugural Global Social Mobility reportproduced by the World Economic Forum. The report ranks 82 countries according to their performance across five key pillars: healthcare, education, technology access, working conditions, and social protection.

While most countries aim to create a level playing field, which places best live up to this lofty and challenging mission?

The Spectrum of Social Mobility

Social mobility refers to the movement of individuals either up or down the socioeconomic ladder relative to their current standing, such as a low-income family moving up to become a part of the middle class.

Countries with high levels of social mobility exhibit lower levels of income inequality and provide more equally shared opportunities for its citizens across each of the five pillars.

Here is how all 82 countries rank, according to the report:

There are a number of countries that set an example for social mobility that others can follow.

The Mobility Medal Winners

All of the countries in the top 10 are European, but it is the Nordic countries that sit comfortably at the top of the ranks. 

Denmark holds the title for the most socially mobile country in the world, boasting an index score of 85.2. If a person is born into a low-income family in Denmark, the WEF estimates it would take two generations to reach a median income. In contrast, someone in Brazil or South Africa would take nine generations at the current pace of growth.

As one of the few non-European countries in the top 20, Canada also performs well across the majority of pillars, but similarly to Denmark, it could improve in the area of lifelong learning which includes providing support for the unemployed and teaching digital skills.

The Least Socially Mobile Countries

Developing country Côte d’Ivoire sits at the bottom of the ranks, with an index score of just 34.5. As a nation once ravaged by internal conflict and turbulent economic shifts, the resulting poverty rate remains high at 46.3%. 

While the government has made improvements to its basic social services, the country falls behind on categories like access to education and fair wages, and retains the highest gender inequality rate in the world.

Despite a significant decrease in the percentage of people living in absolute poverty, India ranks low on the index in 76th place. Structural reform is required across all pillars if India is to increase its score, especially in relation to fair wages and education.

Why Invest in Social Mobility?

According to the report, most economies are far from providing fair conditions for their citizens to thrive, with the greatest challenges ranging from lack of social protection and low wages to poor lifelong learning systems. 

Countries that fail to invest in the key pillars of social mobility could experience damaging consequences for governments and citizens alike:

• Precarity (the unpredictability of living without secure and well-paid employment)
• Perceived loss of identity and dignity
• Weakening social fabric
• Eroding trust in institutions
• Disenchantment with political processes

Aside from the social returns, the economic impact of investing in the right blend of social mobility pillars could be substantial.

Calculating the True Cost

The report dives into the opportunity cost of low social mobility and finds that if each country increased its score by just 10 index points, it could result in an extra 4.41% of cumulative GDP growth for the global economy by 2030—equal to $5.1 trillion.

China alone could add $1 trillion of GDP growth by 2030 if a 10 point increase is achieved:

Although social mobility can act as an economic lever, many countries are struggling to provide the optimal conditions for their citizens to thrive. For those countries, globalization and technology may continue to exacerbate income inequality.

If countries are unable to create new social mobility pathways towards more inclusive economies, they risk being stuck in a cycle where inequality remains entrenched—and history continues to repeats itself.

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China

Meet China’s 113 Cities With More Than One Million People

China has the same amount of 1 million+ population cities as both North America and the EU combined. Here they all are, from biggest to smallest.

Published

6 days ago

on

February 6, 2020

In 2010, China’s urban-dwelling population surpassed its rural population, marking a monumental demographic milestone in the country’s history.

Just three decades prior, China looked markedly different. Only 20% of Chinese citizens lived in urban areas, and many of today’s metropolises were still small villages.

Since then, huge swaths of the population have moved from farmland into cities, a shift that is still causing many urban areas to swell in size. Case in point is the growth of Guangzhou, which lays just north of Hong Kong. From 1980 to today, more than 18 million people moved into the city. A 40-year-old born in Guangzhou will have seen their small, regional city mushroom into one of the largest urban amalgamations on Earth.

Of course, this is just one example of a process that has been altering the landscape of cities from the coast of the South China Sea out to the Eurasian Steppe.

The One Million+ Club

According to Demographia’s World Urban Areas report, there are now 113 urban areas in China that surpass the one million population threshold. In comparison, North America and the EU combined have 114 urban areas that surpass one million people.

Below is a full breakdown of China’s one million+ club:

Unparalleled Urbanization

The massive scale of rural-to-urban migration isn’t just a major development within China, it has no parallel in modern history.

Since 1980, over half a billion people have moved from the countryside to an urban center. The construction of these new cities took a staggering amount of raw materials. Few data points highlight the scale of construction better than China’s cement production in recent years.

In 2018, Chinese construction used about 8x the amount of second place India, which has a similar population size.

Megacities on Megacities

Cities with over 10 million inhabitants are defined as megacities. China is already home to six megacities, with another three urban areas well on the way to achieving that status.

In fact, some megacities within close proximity have grown so large that they are merging into contiguous urban areas. The most prominent example of this phenomenon is in the Pearl River Delta region of China.

The Pearl River Delta region is not only home to the megacities of Guangzhou and Shenzhen, but also a number of other sizable cities that are quickly merging into a unified continuous entity containing up to 50 million people. Demographia still considers most of these cities to be separate labor markets ⁠— but as more connections form across the region, the Pearl River Delta could be poised to become the largest unified urban area in human history.

Westward Migration

As megacities like Shanghai and Shenzhen have grown and developed, they’ve also become more expensive places to live and do business. The economic evolution of these cities has created opportunity for smaller, less developed cities to woo both residents and businesses.

This natural reshuffling has led to impressive growth in cities further inland like Zhengzhou, which sits 350 miles (630 kms) east of the coastline where many of the country’s largest cities reside.

Using the “build it and they will come” approach, the city converted a 160 square mile (410 sq km) patch of empty land into the Zhengzhou Airport Economy Zone (ZAEZ). The project has proven wildly successful, and the city even has the nickname “Apple City” thanks to the presence of Foxconn (which produces the iPhone) and a cluster of other smartphone manufacturers.

This airport-centered zone was developed with the full political and economic backing of Beijing as part of a broader effort to increase economic activity in China’s interior cities. Zhengzhou has nearly tripled in size over the last decade, a powerful testament to the shift in economic momentum.

China’s Inland All-Stars:

Urban Area	Population 2010	Population 2019	Change (2010-19)
Chengdu	4.8M	12.1M	+152%
Xi'an	4.0M	7.1M	+77%
Wuhan	5.2M	8.5M	+63%
Chongqing	5.4M	8.3M	+53%

Compare the numbers above to fast-growing cities in the U.S., such as Las Vegas or Phoenix, which managed 33% and 12% growth respectively over the last decade.

If this trend continues, China’s one million+ club will most likely expand once fresh census data is released in 2021.