Circular mobility to settlement; casual laborer to national worker; citizen back to migrant. This dissertation examines the history of Singapore’s port and the everyday life of its migrant workers as the city moved from British imperial port integrated into the region of Malaya to inexplicable city-nation-state. Port workers’ everyday lives were structured by the flows of migration and capital around the Indian Ocean that underpinned the British empire, defined the relationship between port worker and labor contractor, and produced ethnicized urban and social life. As an imperial port, Singapore developed thick historical connections with other British colonial ports. Chinese and Indian capital knitted together Singapore, Hong Kong, and Bombay and made them the hubs of their respective regions reliant on a constant supply of migrant labor. Previously connected and functionally similar, Singapore, Hong Kong, and Bombay began to diverge in the 1950s as the post-war trends of decolonization, the Cold War, and containerization changed their importance as models of Asian urbanism. These trends reshaped working practices, composition of worker gangs, and the urban fabric of the Singapore port to co-opt the transnational lives of port workers into the new nation. Drawing on port authority reports, police reports, kinship association records, and oral history collections, this dissertation intervenes in the historiography of Singapore by showing how the economic miracle of Singapore was built on forgetting the port’s place in the Malay and Indian Ocean worlds and port workers’ visions and experiences of a Singapore that was deeply connected to its region and the liberation movements of the Global South.

A research report submitted to the Faculty of Commerce, Law and Management, University of the Witwatersrand, in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Management (ENVC) Johannesburg, 2017 / The ability of immigrants to craft successful livelihoods in the harsh economic climate that seems to overwhelm the local population has led to them being blamed for the unfortunate plight of South Africa’s poor, with the result that there has been targeted violence on immigrants in recent years. Informal sector entrepreneurship is at the heart of this with immigrants said to be outperforming local entrepreneurs, and taking away the last option of earning an income. Entrepreneurship is quoted as the only lasting solution to the poverty and unemployment that plagues developing countries. The ability of immigrants to succeed in a sector that is considered unproductive is worth investigating. In this study, cross sectional data is used to compare the antecedents of Entrepreneurial Performance between foreign Immigrants and South Africans. The findings are that, while both group’s performance is affected by Entrepreneurial Action; South African performance is driven mainly by deprivation, a factor that has no effect on immigrants. This puts the recent explosive response of local entrepreneurs to immigrant competition into perspective, and necessitates interventions that will, not only curb further xenophobic violence, but up-skill local entrepreneurs and enable them to make a living out of informal sector entrepreneurship. Contrary to popular belief, none of the population’s performance was linked to Social Capital. There is no use allowing people into the country only to stifle their ability to sustain themselves. Immigrant Entrepreneurship is a reality that South Africa needs to embrace. / MT2017

This dissertation includes three papers on pro-work reforms of the North Korean Defector Settlement Support System (NKDSSS) and the economic adjustment of the North Korean Defectors (NKDs) in South Korea. Paper 1 analyzes changes in benefit levels caused by the pro-work reforms to the NKDSSS and differences in the total benefit levels across groups, classified by the ability to work, employment status, and income level. Paper 2 examines the causal effect of the pro-work reforms on the NKDs’ economic adjustment. Paper 3 evaluates the association between the NKDs’ human capital and welfare receipt.

This qualitative exploratory study sought to understand highly educated Iraqi and Syrian refugees’ perceptions of their learning experiences during economic integration in Luxembourg. This research sought to elucidate how these new migrants learned to integrate in a country with a long tradition of migration but little exposure to Arabic-speaking groups. Further, it sought to explore participants’ experiences of what knowledge, skills, and practices they required, how these were learned, what facilitators and inhibitors they faced, and the impact of identity and religion.In-depth, semi-structured interviews were conducted with 20 refugee participants who had arrived in Luxembourg since 2015 and from 10 professionals working in refugee integration programs. Additional data were collected from critical incident questionnaires and document analysis. Several key findings emerged from interviews. First, participants reported high professional status prior to their forced migration and gratitude toward Luxembourg for its support, despite their many challenges. Second, participants identified linguistic skills, market-relevant experience, Western qualifications, and adaptability as essential for integration, which (apart from academic qualifications) were learned informally. Third, timely professional exposure was a facilitator to integration, while Luxembourg’s multilingualism, job market, work regulations, and discrimination were inhibitors. Fourth, participants reported stigma and invisibility around their refugee identity. Their religious beliefs did not influence their economic integration. This research draws four main conclusions. First, migrants navigated the impact of wars which disrupted their lives alongside an uncertain present, fraught challenges and mixed feelings. Second, while linguistic skills, relevant academic qualifications, and adaptability were important, there exists tension between the non-formal learning refugee integration ecosystem failing to account for the informal learning that new migrants required. Third, while timely professional exposure facilitates economic integration, Luxembourg’s ‘equal-for-all’ (but pragmatically restrictive) frameworks and multilingualism delay new migrants’ integration. Fourth, there is little shared understanding among stakeholders on the impact of identity and religion in economic integration. The recommendations of this study are to (1) champion timely access of migrants to the job market through intensive language training and professional exposure; (2) assess fairness of employment frameworks for non-majority groups; and (3) reflect on an inclusive, fair, and diverse national adult education strategy.

The notion of deterritorialization occupies a central role in contemporary interpretations of immigrants’ home-related consumption engagements. Through their work on home maintenance, consumer researchers have unveiled a remarkable set of insights related to consumption patterns immigrants develop with the purpose of maintaining previous home-ties. Consumer researchers have for instance demonstrated how immigrants transform and get transformed by the home-related consumption goods available in host countries. The notion of home maintenance has been largely applied with the meaning of immigrants “keeping up” with a past life context they can no longer enjoy in contemporary home places. Yet, less attention has been devoted to migrants’ willingness to preserve existential connections with places of origin and/or childhood. <p>Drawing on the stories of 14 Latin American migrants living in Belgium, this doctoral research relativizes this deterritorialized perspective through the means of the philosophical notion of narrative identity. This philosophical point of view puts forward the open link that exists between current life stories and past experiences. Individuals reconfigure their own personal narratives by integrating both past and present experiences. Accordingly, there is a continuity of narrative that contrasts with frequent disruptions in life, implying a perpetual interpretation <p>and re-interpretation of one’s life. This exercise is not a self-reflecting process of an individual that is distinct from his or her cultural references. The construction of a personal narrative identity is also a dialogue with many others and their past and future stories. In the case of migrants, even many years after “successful” experiences of migration, they can experience recurring tendencies to return, homecoming tendencies. These tendencies, which are not necessarily aimed at a final and long term return, reflect the notion that preserving affiliations to one’s place of origin or childhood is not only a matter of consuming resources available in receiving contexts, but also of consuming and sharing with many others in places of origin. While Home maintenance relies heavily on migrant’s willingness and or capacity to remember home places as they were before they migrated. The homecoming tendencies notion, here proposed, is oriented towards migrants’ eagerness to constantly re-discover home places in their contemporary situations and towards their active goal for avoiding disappearing from view back home. <p> / Doctorat en Sciences économiques et de gestion / info:eu-repo/semantics/nonPublished

This dissertation takes as its subjects East European Jewish women who sold sex in their homelands and/or abroad and situates their engagement in sex work within the broader structures these women navigated – labor markets, state laws on residence and migration, community and family. This project turns working-class Jewish women, who migrated within and from Eastern Europe and sold sexual services, into protagonists in their own story and writes them back into modern Eastern European Jewish economic and migration histories. Between 1870 and 1939, Eastern European Jews suffered from consistent official and unofficial anti-Jewish discrimination in the labor market. This discrimination, combined with ongoing economic changes and crises, hindered Jewish socio-economic advancement and instead drove more and more Jews into poverty. Both married and single women were pressed financially to find gainful employment but encountered a labor market with too few opportunities. In these circumstances, the state-sanctioned sex industry, which was Jewish madams and pimps had their part, provided them with economic prospects and facilitated their physical mobility, which was a privilege in this period. By 1914, Jews, especially women, found it almost impossible to leave the Russian Empire legally. After the Great War, immigration restrictions became a virtually global phenomenon, again severely limiting the options of Jews for leaving Eastern Europe. In the interwar years, anxieties about trafficking turned into laws restricting single women's movement and preventing immigration to popular destinations, such as the United States or Argentina. Despite these challenges, some Eastern European Jewish women who sold sex turned out to be particularly mobile. They moved within Eastern Europe, crossing borders between empires, and regularly circulated across seas and oceans to the Middle East and the Americas. By viewing these women as economic actors and labor migrants, this dissertation seeks to reconceptualize prostitution as one of the ways in which Eastern European Jews from the working poor navigated the transformative and increasingly challenging period between 1870 and 1939. This rewriting of Jewish prostitution as a rich social history of Eastern European Jewish women from the lower classes relies on a wide range of sources that, on the one hand, provide access to the women’s voices (though rarely unmediated) and, on the other, expose how class-biased and moralistic interpretation has been imposed on their life stories. Unlike most of the previous studies on this topic, this project looks at Jewish prostitution from the Eastern European perspective and uses materials produced by this Jewish population and the surrounding society – Jewish and non-Jewish press in Polish, Yiddish, and Hebrew; Habsburg, Russian, and Polish state-produced labor and prostitution reports as well as ministerial and police records.

This dissertation consists of three papers on intergenerational transfers and associated differences between immigrant and U.S. native-born (native) families. The first paper investigates differences in intergenerational transfers between immigrant and native families. The second paper examines the impacts of life events on intergenerational transfers and corresponding differences between immigrant and native families. Lastly, the third paper investigates the impacts of the U.S. Social Security program on intergenerational transfers and associated differences between immigrant and native families.

In today’s globalised world, everyday life becomes increasingly “liquid” - changing and fragile - as individuals continuously adapt their lifestyle and behaviour to global influences (Bauman 2000). To provide a general framework for understanding this world, Appadurai (1996) introduces five “dimensions” of global flows in his seminal work Modernity At Large: ethnoscapes, financescapes, mediascapes, ideoscapes, and technoscapes. One of them, the ethnoscapes, refers to the increased mobility of individuals and peoples, impacting their cultural affiliations and social networks. <p>The focus of this thesis lies on international, cross-border migrants, the primary representatives of these uprooted individuals. Studying migrants’ consumption behaviour provides a better understanding of the issues faced by all members of liquid life in terms of consumption behaviour, whether they are migrants or not, by referring to its most extreme cases.<p>The present dissertation addresses migrant consumer research through an original angle. It suggests that international migrants position themselves in the global mediascapes of cosmopolitanism and transmigrant communities by activating different consumption discourses. This approach offers a solution to previous ambiguous categorisations of international migrants by relying on self-categorisation across national and cultural boundaries instead of outside-defined sociodemographic or geopolitical criteria. In addition to providing a typology based on the migrants’ strategies of positioning that explains global consumer acculturation, the results allow for a disambiguation of the notions of immigrants, globals and cosmopolitans.<p>The contribution of the dissertation lies in its contrast to existing research, and is therefore more adapted to the liquidity of our modern world. Indeed, the field of consumer research as much as political discourse or companies tend to categorise international migrants according to socioeconomic or geopolitical criteria, such as education, duration of stay or ethnic origin. While consumer research often views low-skilled immigrants in light of specific ethnic groups (Peñaloza 1994, Oswald 1999, Üçok 2007), cross-cultural samples represent the preferred approach to highly-skilled expatriates (Thompson and Tambyah 1999). Consumer research addresses and considers these categories of migrants differently, a questionable postulation in light of global flows which render movement across nations more complex and lead to mixed and multiple cultural affiliations. <p>The main research question to answer in the present thesis is: How do international migrants use consumption behaviour to make sense of their experience? Its broad character allows for new insights and approaches to emerge, both on the side of existing literature and on the empirical side. <p>The dissertation initiates the answer by a first review of the literature. The review highlights gaps and contradictions which can be found in the literature centred on international migrants and their consumption behaviour. The explanation of the context of this research encompasses the definition of consumer culture as well as of globalisation. Indeed, consumption as a discourse plays a role especially in terms of the subscription to a particular group; individuals use consumption to communicate, to express their affiliation with a family, or a place, to situate their identity in their universe (Douglas and Isherwood 1979). These issues change in the global context, and therefore need review. Migration research constitutes the second chapter of the literature review. It presents on the one hand the people endeavouring migration, and on the other, illustrates the various models explaining migration as a process. <p>Based on this review, the research question transforms, splitting it into three elements, each focusing on one element: cultural affiliations, migrant networks and consumer acculturation. The consequent empirical part aims at answering these three questions through three separate, though complementary, research phases, which rely on in-depth interviews, focus groups and observations. Each phase predominantly addressed one research question, though all three elements remain present in all phases. <p>Different types of consumption discourses emerge; in the case of a focus on products of home and/or host culture, three locality discourses develop. Seven globality discourses integrate global and other foreign products in the equation. International migrants seem to use these locality and globality discourses to position themselves in today’s liquid world. They can consequently be compared to the twelve worlds that are presented by Rosenau (2004) as positioning strategies resulting from global “fragmegration”, that is, the difficulty of integrating fragmented and contradictory elements of global societies. <p>The contribution of this dissertation lies in the integration of more diversity in the concepts of cultural affiliations, migrant networks and consumer acculturation. Consequently, the locality and globality discourses provide indications as to the acculturation strategies possible for its members.<p>Doing so, this thesis integrates debates of the local and the global, immigrants versus expatriates, integration versus acculturation, a comparison of interest to both researchers and marketers. On a theoretical level, the thesis provides thus a more generalised view on international migrants, incorporating previous categories. It provides practical solutions, both on a political and on a managerial level. The provided typology enables policy-makers and managers to better understand the new tendencies and problematics inherent to international migration and to address migrants in a way taking into account their actual affiliations and networks. <p> / Doctorat en Sciences économiques et de gestion / info:eu-repo/semantics/nonPublished

Remittances (money sent home by migrants) to developing countries are estimated to have reached US$ 325 billion in 2010 (World Bank, 2011). These amounts reflect only officially recorded transfers, transferred through formal channels and calculated as the sum of three items of the Balance of Payments Statistics, namely: compensation of employees, workers’ remittances and migrants’ transfers (Salomone, 2006; Aggarwal et al. 2011). Unrecorded remittances could represent 50 to 100% of recorded flows (World Bank, 2006; Hagen-Zanker and Siegel, 2007).<p>Remittances are three times the size of official development assistance (ODA) and the second source of external funds after foreign direct investment (FDI) for developing countries. Given their weight in receiving countries’ economies and household livelihood in many developing countries (for instance, remittances flows represent more than 25% of Lesotho’ and Moldavia’s gross domestic product in 2008), there is increasing policy and research interest in remittances as development resource. Furthermore, unlike FDI and ODA, remittances have the particularity to be directly affected to families, even those in remote areas, where development funds don’t arrive (Shaw, 2006). The thesis addresses the relationship between microfinance and the impact remittances have on domestic investment in developing countries. <p>Like other sources of external finance, remittances allow the economy to invest in human and physical capital (health, education), which contribute to growth (Ziesemer, 2006; Acosta et al. 2008). However, as remittances may be either directly consumed (remittances allow households to smooth their consumption, see for instance Lucas and Stark, 1985 and Glytsos, 2005) or used to invest in physical and human capital, it appears that their impact on domestic investment is perceived to be low or limited, given the amount of money they represent each year. According to literature, this is due to the small share that is dedicated to the launch or the support of economic activities. Actually, the allocation between consumption and investment, which depends on various factors such as the level of dependence households have with remittances, the migrant gender, and the existence of a credit constraint, varies on average around 10-20% of remittances that are not directly consumed (Salomone, 2006; Sorensen, 2004; Orozco, 2004). In the thesis we focus on the share of remittances that is saved and wonder how to maximize its impact, whatever this share. We are interested in the role of microfinance institutions, as actors of the financial sector, on this issue. Actually, two recent contributions, Mundaca (2009), and Giuliano and Ruiz-Arranz (2009), stress the role of the development of the financial sector. More precisely, the thesis focuses on a set of questions or issues that may be important for the microfinance industry to consider when interested in remittances flows and the deposits they may generate. <p>Financial development is generally defined as “increasing efficiency of allocating financial resources and monitoring capital projects, through encouraging competition and increasing the importance of the financial system. In other words, the development is about structure, size and efficiency of a financial system” (Huang, 2006). A large line of research work provides evidence that development of a financial system is a key driver of economic growth. <p>King and Levine (1993) argue that greater financial development increases economic growth. Levine and Zervos (1993) shows that growth is related to stock market activity, among other variables. Levine (1999) finds a significant effect of determinants of financial intermediation on economic growth. Beck et al. (2004) find strong evidence in favor of the financial-services view which stresses that financial systems provide key financial services, crucial for firm creation, industrial expansion, and economic growth. Levine (1997), Levine et al. (2000), and Beck et al. (2000) also stress the impact of financial development on growth. There is also an empirical literature that argues that the expansion and the deepening of the financial system lead to higher investment (see for instance Rajan and Zingales, 1998; Demirgüç-Kunt and Macksimovic, 1998). <p>By providing financial services to people whom traditionally do not have access to financial institutions, microfinance institutions (MFIs) may contribute to increasing the size of the financial system in many developing countries. Actually, according to the CFSI’s 2011 report, the one thousand-plus MFIs that report to the Microfinance Information eXchange (MIX) have 88 million borrowers and 76 million savers. Total assets of these MFIs amount to US$ 60 billion (CFSI, 2011). <p>The quite recent literature on remittances, financial development and growth can be categorized under two main approaches (Brown et al. 2011). One approach explores the relationship between remittances and financial development, with a view to assessing their impact on the level of financial development in receiving countries. The underlying argument is that remittances potentially contribute to financial development through both demand- and supply- side effects: by increasing households’ demand for and use of banking services, and by increasing the availability of loanable funds to the financial sector. According to this approach which consider the direct relationship between remittances and financial development, remittances have an impact on both financial outreach and depth in receiving countries, respectively through the fostering of financial literacy among remittances receivers and through the increasing availability of funds (see for instance Gupta et al. 2009, Aggarwal et al. 2011, Brown et al. 2011). <p>The second approach examines the remittances – financial development relationship indirectly by investigating how the given level of financial development in a country affects the impact of remittances on growth. This growth-focused approach allows for interactions between remittances and financial development in estimating growth equations for remittances receiving countries. Within the set of studies related to this approach, two opposing positions have emerged. The first position hypothesizes that the greater availability of financial services helps channel remittances to better use, thus boosting their overall impact on growth. Remittances are seen as financial flows in search of good investment projects, and good financial institutions are needed to facilitate the channeling of remittances to such investments. In this sense, remittances and financial system are complements. This position is supported by Mundaca (2009) who find that financial intermediation increases the responsiveness of growth to remittances in Latin America and the Caribbean over the 1970-2002 period. Other few studies also argue that channeling remittances through the banking sector enhances their development impact (see for instance Hinojosa Ojeda, 2003 and Terry and Wilson, 2005). <p>The other position argues that remittances contribute to investment and growth by substituting for inefficiencies in credit and capital markets. Remittances provide an alternative source of funding for profitable investments by alleviating liquidity constraints. In this sense, remittances promote growth more in less financially developed countries by substituting for lack of credits from financial institutions. This hypothesis is supported by Giuliano and Ruiz-Arranz (2009) who argue that poor households use remittances to finance informal investment in poorly developed financial markets with liquidity constraints. In their study, they interact remittances with a measure of financial development in standard growth equations, for a sample of 73 countries over the 1975-2002 period. Ramirez and Sharma (2009) obtain similar results using data from 23 Latin American countries over the 1990-2005 period. <p>The thesis contributes to existing knowledge on this indirect, growth-focused approach. Given the two existing opposite views on remittances impact on investment and the level of financial intermediation (a high level of financial development implies a high level of financial intermediation), in the thesis we first analyze the relationship that links these variables. We then analyses questions related to microfinance institutions (MFIs), as financial intermediaries. <p>Our focus on microfinance is made from two different perspectives, leading to different research questions. First, from the demand or microfinance clients’ perspective, we question about the interest for them to have MFIs entering the money transfers market (through the money transfer facilities and/or financial products that may be directly linked to remittances). The underlying argument is that MFIs enter the remittances market by providing money transfer services because there is a need for such services (and for other financial services) from their (potential) clients who are remittances receivers and migrants. According to this point of view, MFIs can contribute to recycle remittances flows into the financial system by contributing to the financial inclusion of remittances receivers and migrants thanks to the supply of adapted financial products. The occurrence of this assumption can therefore be measured by considering the involvement of MFIs on the remittances market as a determinant of financial inclusion indicators. Second, from the supply or MFIs’ perspective, we question about the rationale for MFIs to enter the remittances market. Here, the underlying argument is that MFIs are interested in operating on the remittances market because working with migrants can potentially contributes to the improvement of their financial and social performances. According to this perspective, remittances market opportunities as well as MFIs’ characteristics will determine the offer of money transfer services by MFIs. This supply approach therefore leads to the consideration of money transfers activities in MFIs as depending on remittances market opportunities and institutional variables. <p>Therefore, our papers related to microfinance will be articulated around these two questions (interest for clients and rationale for MFIs to have MFIs operating on the money transfers industry) by focusing, as argued earlier, on the deposits resulting from remittances flows. <p>As a matter of facts, by studying the relationship between microfinance and remittances respectively through the demand and the supply perspective, we raise causality issues related to MFIs’ money transfer activities and their impacts on MFIs performances. Actually, MFIs’ characteristics such as the right to collect public savings, as a potential source of efficiency gains, may significantly determine the supply of a money transfer service (MFIs’ perspective), while a money transfer service may itself be the determinant of some MFIs’ performance indicators related to financial inclusion, such as the volume of deposits made by clients (demand approach). However, given currently existing data on MFIs’ involvement on the remittances market we cannot consider simultaneously both perspectives in order to implement causality treatment techniques. Actually, the indicator of MFIs’ involvement we will use in our regressions is time invariant, therefore we are not able to build instrumental variables for instance (such as lagged values of our variable of interest) to eliminate econometric issues in our regressions. Nevertheless, through these two approaches taken separately, we contribute to some extend to the knowledge by putting in perspective different issues at stake for the microfinance industry. <p>Before we tackle our research questions we have an introductory chapter related to remittances flows: what are their trends, determinants and characteristics? The chapter also includes the definition of money transfer activities that we will use in the thesis, as well as an overview of MFIs’ involvement on the money transfers market. <p>Then, our research framework is divided into 4 sub-questions. The first one, treated in Chapter 2, is about the relationship between our variables of interest. What is the impact of the financial sector development (FSD) on the remittances’ impact on investment? This chapter aims at stressing the relationship existing between financial intermediation and remittances’ impacts on investment, which motivated our focus on MFIs (as financial intermediaries between remittances and the formal economy) in the following chapters. We focus on two transaction costs that decline with FSD. The first is the “Cost of Bank Depositing”, henceforth CDEP, which measures the difficulties of savers, particularly the less well-off, of depositing their savings in the formal banking system. The second transaction cost is the “Cost of External Finance”, henceforth CEXF, which measures the marginal cost for the banking system of borrowing in global financial markets. This cost is notably associated with the robustness of the country’s financial sector. In a stylized model of the lendable funds market, we analyze how both these variables affect the marginal effect of remittances on investment. We test model’s propositions using country-level data on remittances, investment, and proxies for both CDEP and CEXF, on a sample of 100 developing countries. We perform empirical tests using both cross-section and panel-data with country fixed effects, over the period 1975-2004. The results demonstrate, theoretically and empirically, that remittances and ease of access to the banking sector act as complements to stimulate domestic investment, while remittances and external borrowing are substitutes. We find that remittances flows stimulate local investment, as a part of remittances indeed become banks’ deposits, which increases the availability of lendable funds, reduces the interest rate and stimulates investment. In terms of policy implication, results suggest that enhancing financial sector development is crucial as it allows remittances to better fuel domestic investment. This is even truer when the access to international funds is difficult or costly. Improving the financial inclusion of remittances receivers by developing domestic banks’ ability to collect their savings is then a straightforward recommendation to policymakers who want to improve remittances impact on investment. <p>The second question, developed in Chapter 3 is related to the demand perspective of the relationship between microfinance and remittances. We want to assess whether there is a need from remittances receivers for financial products that may be linked to remittances. We aboard this question by assessing whether the supply of MTA leads to higher volume of deposits mobilized by MFIs, meaning that MFIs actually contribute or succeed in turning remittances into deposits. Using an original database of 114 MFIs –operating in Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC), South Asia (SA), East Asia and the Pacific (EAP), and Africa–, we perform empirical tests to study whether MFIs are able to capture migrants’ savings thanks to their money transfer activity. We test the impact of money transfer activity on deposits, using the natural logarithm of deposits as explained variable. Our main result suggests that money transfer activity has a significant positive impact on savings collection. MFIs involved in the remittances market thus attract more savings than MFIs that are not involved in it, probably coming from migrants and remittances receivers who are in need of adapted financial services. This confirms the opportunity MFIs may represent as a tool or a channel to improve remittances impact on investment. In that sense, MFIs should then be encouraged to operate on the remittances market, and to design financial products dedicated to migrants and remittances receivers. <p>The third question, developed in Chapter 4, is related to the supply approach of the relationship between remittances and microfinance. More precisely, we try to identify factors that seem to explain the availability of such service in the scope of services provided by MFIs. In this chapter, we focus first on potential sources of efficiency gains linked to the money transfer activity as a rationale for diversification (i.e. the expansion of the offer). And second, using an original database of 435 MFIs –operating in Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC), South Asia (SA), East Asia and the Pacific (EAP), and Africa–, we perform empirical tests using cross-section over the year 2006, to identify which environmental and institutional parameters have an impact on the willingness of a MFI to provide a money transfer service. We test the impact of various variables that are related to one of the rationale for MFIs to enter the money transfer market, namely economies of scale and scope as a source of efficiency gains, on the probability to have a money transfer service provided by a given MFI. Our main result suggests that the size, as well as the fact that an MFI collects savings have a positive and significant impact on this probability, while the level of financial development negatively impact it. This confirms among other things that the ability to realize economies of scale through a potential increase of collected deposits may be a determinant of managers’ choice to diversify. Policies that contribute to reduce entry barriers in low financially developed countries should then, among other things, be encouraged to have MFIs fully playing their role of intermediaries between remittances and the (formal) economy. <p>The chapter 5 questions about the institutional consequences for MFIs to collect migrants’ savings. The aim of this chapter is to give an insight on the opportunity migrants’ money (including remittances) could represent for the microfinance industry as a source of stable medium- and long-term funds. It is therefore related to the supply approach and the motivation for MFIs to enter the remittances market by analyzing the impact of migrants’ deposits (which include remittances) on another potential source of efficiency gains, namely the internal capital market. Through a case study approach, this chapter is devoted to the analysis of funding risk in microfinance, comparing migrants’ and locals’ time deposits. Migrants’ time deposits are expected to be of longer term and more stable (in terms of early withdrawals) than locals’ deposits. This assumption had never been tested yet. Based on an original database of 7,828 deposit contracts issued between 2002 and 2008 by 12 village banks belonging to a major Malian rural microfinance network (PASECA-Kayes), we used the Cox proportional hazard model to identify the variables that have an impact on the probability to have early withdrawals, and the technique of re-sampling to calculate withdrawal rates and deposits at risk. Results from the Cox methodology suggest that the migration status is not a direct determinant for the probability to have an early withdrawal. However, this probability increases with the amount deposited and the term of the contract which are both higher for migrants compared to non-migrants. The re-sampling method results suggest that withdrawal rates are not the same for the two categories of depositors observed. We find higher withdrawal rate distributions for migrants than for locals. The value at risk is also higher on migrants’ deposits than on locals’ deposits. However, as migrants tend to deposit for longer term than locals, through the calculation of durations we have measured to which extend migrants’ deposits still have a positive impact on MFIs’ liabilities. It appears that migrants’ money has a marginal but positive impact on time deposits durations, either when considering early withdrawals, which impacts are very limited, except in 2007 (the worst year in terms of amount withdrawn early). As our results show that MFIs that receive migrants’ deposits are not necessarily better-off than without migrants’ money in terms of funding risk - and durations - this paper has stressed the importance of assessing more carefully the role of migrants for the microfinance industry. <p><p><p><p> / Doctorat en Sciences économiques et de gestion / info:eu-repo/semantics/nonPublished

王帮清. / "2008年8月". / "2008 nian 8 yue". / Thesis (M.Phil.)--Chinese University of Hong Kong, 2008. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 96). / Abstracts in Chinese and English. / Wang Bangqing. / 關鍵詞與摘要 / Abstract and Key words / Chapter 第一章、 --- 序言 / Chapter 第一節， --- 問題與學術史 / Chapter 第二節， --- “懷遠人´ح生活的時空地理環境 / Chapter 第三節， --- 材料與方法 / Chapter 第四節， --- 論文內容 / Chapter 第二章、 --- 建立“懷遠都´ح：對地權的爭奪 / Chapter 第一節、 --- 移民的湧入 / Chapter 第二節、 --- 入籍建都，爭奪地權 / Chapter 第三章、 --- 建立文季：只爲賓興？ / Chapter 第一節， --- 懷遠都各圖甲所屬之文季 / Chapter 第二節， --- 四都二圖所屬之文昌宮：互助還是高利貸？ / Chapter 第四章、 --- 梯雲書院：懷遠人的聯合控產機構 / Chapter 第一節， --- 梯雲書院的建立 / Chapter 第二節， --- 梯雲書院的財產控制 / Chapter 第五章、 --- 全善局和華國堂：不止是爲漕糧 / Chapter 第一節， --- 咸豐三年之前的漕糧糾紛 / Chapter 第二節， --- 全善局與華國堂 / Chapter 第六章、 --- 結論：社會轉變下的身份建構 / 參考書目