The biggest development economics story of my life is something I was never taught in any of the textbooks in high school or college. No development economist, many of whom do originate from the Global South, was able to foresee that remittance will play a much bigger role in development than foreign aid or even trade.
Aid is big, trade is much bigger, but the biggest of them is remittance. And we have to put remittance in a separate category from trade because we have still not achieved that stage in human evolution when we might realize a completely free movement of people all over the world will immediately add a few trillion dollars to the global GDP. Money moves. Goods move. But people get clamped down. That is where we are.
What is remittance? People move from poor countries not always to the richest countries. More often they move to slightly richer countries. They work the lowest-paying jobs. They save money when saving might be thought of as impossible. They pay shark rates to move money. And they send money home. This has been the greatest driver of development in the past few decades. No economist was able to foresee it.
There is enormous value created when you make it possible for people to move money. And that is elemental. That is not even banking. When you make that movement instantaneous and free, the value is so, so much larger. And the Blockchain promises to do that. The Blockchain is going to be more revolutionary than the Internet. The Internet has been the appetizer. The Blockchain is the meal.
Money Moved, Value Created https://t.co/YS6qahAsUP @raypaxful @paxful @skyzer4ever @msantoriESQ @ChrisConeyInt
— Paramendra Kumar Bhagat (@paramendra) July 18, 2019
