New figures for old stories: Migration and remittances in Nepal

Abstract

Labour migration and remittances are major economic main-stays for Nepal’s economy. However, there is still insuffi-cient documentation on scale and significance of this proc-ess. Estimations of migration figures suggest that real num-bers are several times higher than official statistics show. Therefore this article contributes to the emerging debate of the last years comparing latest national statistics with own empirical data. The paper concludes that the total numbers of migrants calculated by the authors closely corresponds with official statistics, while amount of remittances seems to be higher indeed, highlighting once more that labour migra-tion and remittances are an important mainstay of Nepal’s economy.Nepal ; labour migration ; remittances