Comments

Thank you for sharing this insightful piece. Your analysis highlights a tension that is often overlooked, while remittances provide vital support to households, they cannot substitute for the development of domestic capacity. I find your emphasis on creating opportunities at home especially compelling. It’s a reminder that sustainable development depends not just on financial inflows, but on building institutions, rewarding merit, and making it viable for citizens to stay and contribute. Your argument challenges policymakers to move beyond short-term relief and focus on the structural reforms necessary to retain human capital and foster long-term economic resilience. Thank you again for bringing attention to this critical issue.

The situation in RMI and FSM is a longstanding one -- here's a Devpolicy Blog from 2010 on this: https://devpolicy.org/micronesian-exodus20101215/ And here’s the discussion paper linked to the 2010 blog: https://pacificpolicy.org/wp-content/blogs.dir/2/files/2015/02/DP16.pdf

This is another of those articles that start from the premise that human population growth is a positive. In a world where the global population was steady at under 200 million until around 600 AD, reached 2,000,000,000 in 1927 and has since risen to 8,300,000,000 in the last 100 years and where resource over use and climate change are the major issues facing the future of humanity we need to recognise that population growth is a very serious negative.

Insightful post on whats happening with population in relatively smaller states in the region.

"They developed by giving people reasons to stay." I know Dr Prasad is well meaning: remittances are not 'development' - I agree; but 'staying' is not necessarily 'development' either. It would be a smarter strategy to encourage small state citizens to leave, drink the world, build networks and nurture ideas that they are NOT likely to nourish by staying put, and THEN come back, wiser, smarter, richer in social capital (if not in economic terms as well). I am all for the 'right to stay', but it has been proven that small island entrepreneurship is typically driven by those islanders who have dabbled with the world outside.

With all the current controversy over Miss Pacific Islands peagent and name calling of Papua New Guineans, this article seems to have aged well. Last year, I spent a couple of months in Singapore and many thought I was a local. I even had local people asking me for directions. When I was in Jarkata in 2018 I had a similar experience although folks there thought I was West Papuan. PNG belongs in ASEAN not PIF!

Dear Jahongir, Thank you. You're absolutely spot on: in a country of just over 900,000 people, losing around 10% of the workforce while importing labour and still reporting low unemployment tells us something structural is happening. It is less about “numbers” and more about governance, politics, between skills and demand, wages and expectations, institutions and trust. Public administration reform is central. If recruitment is transparent, promotions are merit-based, fiscal policy supports enterprise, and corruption is firmly addressed, the signal to citizens changes. People begin to believe that effort will be rewarded at home. As you say, these reforms will not stop migration overnight, nor should that be the goal. Migration is age-old and often beneficial. But good governance and strategic investment can reduce the negative long-term effects of labour outflows and restore balance. And this is about rebuilding institutional confidence.

Dear Mahendra, Thank you for your reflection on this piece. I’m glad the idea of remittances as a structural warning resonated, that was exactly the intention. I plan to write my future piece on policies that matter especially on diaspora bonds and matched savings. Thank you.

Dear Dhurba, Thank you for reading this piece and your kind words.

Dear Rose Marie, Thank you for this very excellent comment from Malta. Malta’s own migration history is actually instructive here. As you rightly pointed our elsewhere in your research that in the 1950s-1960s, large-scale emigration helped relieve unemployment pressures. But Malta did not rely on migration alone. Over time it invested deliberately in education, industrial policy, EU integration, financial services, and institutional reform. Migration became part of the story, and not the whole story. That is the key lesson for small states like those in the Pacific and the Caribbean: migration can buy time, but only strategy, governance, and diversification build prosperity. Remittances can support resilience, but development requires visionary leaders (in short supply these days).

I want further studies on GBV.

I agree that remittances on their own have limited development potential. State development policies, which offer excellent rationale for business growth and attract talent and capital back to the country of origin are needed for development purposes. Otherwise, remittances act as a short-term abeyance of poverty. On other occasions they may act as the incentive to start a small business or send someone to higher education, but for real economic development, more stakeholders need to be involved and an overall strategy for such development needs to be spelt out and acted upon. Thanks for this article.