Description
While migrant remittances have proven resilient through global crises, international financial institutions routinely invoke ‘remittance dependency’ to diagnose structural dysfunctions in states reliant on these flows. The neoliberal turn in development has reinforced assumptions that such states would seek to manage remittances through institutional mechanisms embedded in economic governance. Despite extreme reliance on remittances, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan and Tajikistan have not developed fiscal, regulatory or institutional capacity to manage these inflows. Instead, remittance economies have expanded alongside formal economies, raising a fundamental question: When remittances are central to economic survival, why do states not institutionalise stronger governance mechanisms to control them? More broadly, does remittance dependency reflect state reliance on migrant transfers, or a more complex interdependence between migrants, financial infrastructures and economic hierarchies?
This paper pursues two lines of inquiry. Firstly, it traces how remittance dependency emerged as a policy construct among international, national and local actors in Central Asia. Secondly, it interrogates its normative assumptions, asking whether the primary subject of dependency is the state, migrants or transnational financial infrastructures. Drawing on policy documents and grey literature, the paper develops a political economy account of remittance governance, arguing that remittances are embedded in multiscalar power relations linking IFIs, domestic economies and informal networks. Situating Central Asian remittance regimes within critiques of dependency theory, patron-client relations and global economic governance, the paper rethinks the role of the state in an era of large-scale migration.
