tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9177745.post114288379454883732..comments2024-03-23T11:16:46.213-05:00Comments on El Salvador Perspectives: The side effects of remittancesTimhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02452039674856298357noreply@blogger.comBlogger4125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9177745.post-1143777667751116292006-03-30T22:01:00.000-06:002006-03-30T22:01:00.000-06:00I appreciate this exchange, but I think you are bo...I appreciate this exchange, but I think you are both missing an important point. Nicaragua and Honduras do not have the same level of remittances as El Salvador. They have higher levels of poverty because El Salvador reduced poverty through the receipt of remittances, not through any success of the government's policies. (The only successful policy has been getting the US to keep TPS in place).<BR/><BR/>With the higher levels of poverty, Nicaraguans and Hondurans travel to El Salvador to take jobs offered by landowners who don't have to raise wages to a level which will induce Salvadorans (who have the remittance safety net) to work.Timhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/02452039674856298357noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9177745.post-1143698053182903482006-03-29T23:54:00.000-06:002006-03-29T23:54:00.000-06:00Agreed that choice in use of remittances is a priv...Agreed that choice in use of remittances is a private, not public problem.<BR/><BR/>Agreed that easy money with absent parentage can be a recipe for personal disaster. Again, not a public problem.<BR/><BR/>You are correct that the journalist attributes the wage rise to remittances, but then she says mass emigration was either caused or dramatically accelerated by neoliberal reform. Methinks she is wrong in this, as in much of the rest. I can think of other countries that liberalized in the late 20th and did not cause emigration: Ireland, Poland, Czechia, Estonia, New Zealand, and Great Britain. These examples could undercut her arguments, except all of these other nations were highly educated and wealthy when compared to ES.<BR/><BR/><B>But what other countries had mass economic emigration and remittance growth, and yet failed to liberalize? The Philippines?</B><BR/><BR/>It would be interesting to know, for comparative purposesEl-Visitadorhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/08823897085882597971noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9177745.post-1143667916720976412006-03-29T15:31:00.000-06:002006-03-29T15:31:00.000-06:00El Visitador,You rightly point out that the author...El Visitador,<BR/><BR/>You rightly point out that the author is incoherent and I have no idea where she gets the idea that real wages have declined over the past 17 years. However, it is clear that she attributes the rise in wages compared to El Salvador’s neighbors to remittances, not neoliberal reform. There is an interesting point here. <BR/><BR/>1) The wage at which Salvadorians willing to work has gone up because so many of them receive free money from abroad. A lot of Salvadorians would rather sit at home than work at Third World wages (can you blame them).<BR/>2) Such a wage is not justified by Salvadorian productivity, so investment goes elsewhere.<BR/>3) The only way to get wages back in line with productivity is increased investment in human capital or reduced remittances (i.e. starve people into working).<BR/>4) The obvious solution is for all the parents working in the U.S. sending money to their children in ES to threaten to cut the kids off unless they are in school or otherwise using their time productively. This is easier said than done when you live 2000 miles away and can’t even go back to visit.<BR/><BR/>Part of me thinks this is really a concern for families. If hard working immigrants want to send money so their families in El Salvador can take it easy, who are we to judge? “The cycle of immigration and remittances” seems better than the alternative offered by El Salvador’s neighbors. If you had to choose where to be born under a Rawlsian veil of ignorance, who wouldn’t choose El Salvador over its neighbors? If you are lucky, you get to sit at home and watch the checks come in. If you are unlucky, you get to work in the fields next to Hondurans chasing those higher Salvadorian wages. <BR/><BR/>Having said all that, I think one may be able to make a case that the combination of easy money (i.e. remittances) and children growing up without their parents (because of immigration) is a recipe for gang activity.Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9177745.post-1143521613111997842006-03-27T22:53:00.000-06:002006-03-27T22:53:00.000-06:00Let me get this straight:"increasing wages in rela...Let me get this straight:<BR/><BR/>"increasing wages in relation to neighboring countries, even while they have declined in real terms since the nation embarked on the reforms in 1989."<BR/><BR/>OK... if real-terms wages in ES declined, but still increased in relation to our neighbors that did not embark on reforms... <B>it follows that real-terms wages in the other countries <I>decreased even more.</I></B><BR/><BR/>I.e., she is saying that, the countries that did not implement the same reforms we did are even more miserable! Salvadoreans have more buying power for everything, from books to medicine, than our neighbors! <B>This kind of ruins the rest of her anti-neoliberal arguments, don't you think?</B>El-Visitadorhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/08823897085882597971noreply@blogger.com