Income Transfers and Remittances

Reciprocal transactions and obligations, between individuals as members of families or kinship groups or between representatives of confronting class interests, have recently attracted considerable interest from social scientists of remarkably disparate schools of thought. But even though anthropologists such as Mauss, Polanyi and Sahlins have long stressed the crucial role reciprocal transactions play in social and economic life, the analytical tools for analysing the questions that have been raised have been undeveloped or crude. Much has been written on the topic, but much of that has been rather vague, as if those writing on the subject have been unsure of the theoretical terrain they wish to cover. Correspondingly, the statistical techniques and the type of data required to settle some questions and point to more elaborate issues have either simply not existed or been methodologically questionable or inadequate in other respects.