Filipino Children and the Affective Economy of Saving and Being Saved: Remittances and Debts in Transnational Migrant Families

In 2006 over 50 million migrants from the Asia-Pacific region sent home more than USD 113 billion in remittances (International Fund for Agricultural Development, 2007). Six years later and 10 million more migrant workers worldwide, these remittances hadmore than doubled to USD 260 billion, representing 63 per cent of global flows to all developing countries (International Fund for Agricultural Development, 2013). With the scale and scope of remittances and migrants from the Asia-Pacific region continuing to comprise the highest regional total in the world, not only are an estimated 70 million Asian households – that is, one out of every ten – benefiting from these financial flows (International Fund for Agricultural Development, 2013) in terms of subsistence, poverty alleviation and economic mobility (Massey et al., 1993) but also national governments and their GDP, where the amount of remittances have far exceeded the value of official development assistance and foreign direct investment in countries such as the Philippines, Sri Lanka and Indonesia (Rosewarne, 2012). In the Philippines, the inflow of over USD 21.4 billion (nearly 12 per cent of GDP) in 2012 (Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas (BSP), 2014) and outflow of almost 4.28 million migrants in 2010 solidifies the country as the third largest remittance recipient in the world which, in terms of Southeast Asia, accounts for over half of all remittances (International Fund for Agricultural Development, 2013) and leads as a migrant-sending country to top destinations such as the USA, Saudi Arabia, Canada, Malaysia, Japan, Australia, Italy, Qatar, the UAE and the UK (World Bank, 2011).