Measuring International Remittances in India: Concepts and Empirics

India is the top remittance receiving nation in the world. The international remittance receipts in India have grown at an impressive rate of 300 per cent during the past decade. Understanding the true impact of these foreign exchange flows is possible only with better knowledge and accurate measurement of the volume of these flows. This paper presents an empirical illustration of the different measures of international remittances for India, as measured by different institutions and surveys, and highlights the discrepancies between these measures. The broad objective of the paper is to understand the conceptual and empirical issues involved in measuring these flows. It uses data from the Reserve Bank of India (RBI), International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the National Sample Survey (NSS) of India on international remittances to show that there are large discrepancies in international remittance estimates. [Proglo Working Paper No. 1].