Adriana Castaldo

Gendered Relations and Filial Duties Along the Greek-Albanian Remittance Corridor

Abstract Remittances stand at the heart of the migration-development debate. However, they are overwhelmingly considered in financial and economic terms, neglecting important dimensions, such as gender and patriarchal family structures. This article contributes to rectifying this oversight by analyzing flows of remittances resulting from Albanian migration to neighboring Greece. We draw on a detailed questionnaire survey with 350 remittance-recipient households in rural southeast Albania and 45 in-depth interviews with a selection of these respondents and with remitters living in the Greek city of Thessaloniki. We found that gender is interlinked with generation and life-course stages within the context of Albanian patriarchal norms and that remittances are shaped accordingly. Although remitting to older parents is a filial duty for unmarried sons, upon marriage only the youngest son has this responsibility—other sons send small amounts as tokens of respect and love. Sending remittances is overwhelmingly seen as a “male thing.” Single young women rarely migrate on their own for work abroad. Meanwhile any remittances sent by married daughters to their parents are considered “unofficial,” referred to as “coffee money.” Within nuclear households, some increased power-sharing among husband remitters and wife recipients takes place. However, the latter are far from passive recipients, since they struggle to combine caring for children and the elderly with farmwork or day labor. We conclude that a deeper understanding of how remittances are gendered can be gained by placing their analysis within the migratory and sociocultural context into which they are embedded.

Who Is Most Likely to Migrate from Albania?: Evidence from the Albania Living Standards Measurement Survey

This paper uses the Albania Living Standards Measurement Survey from 2002 to examine the factors that render an individual most prone to international migration. The analysis uses novel data on whether individuals ever considered migrating abroad. The econometric models describe the data well and appear well specified on the basis of diagnostic tests. The estimated results are generally consistent with findings from the empirical literature on the willingness to migrate. It is salutary that the usual characteristics emerge as determining factors, with age, gender, employment status, and education all exerting predictable influences on migration risk. There is also a strong role detected for local labor market conditions and community-level variables that capture, among other things, the prevalence of crime.

Migration and poverty in Albania: what factors are associated with an individual's predisposition to migrate?

The last decade of the 20th century witnessed one of the largest economic experiments of that century as former communist countries embarked on attempts to transform their economies from centrally planned to market-based systems. The transformation process influenced the direction of economic policies and shaped the nature of social policies, business practices and institutions. The collapse of the central planning system in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union also provided the erstwhile citizens of many communist regimes with opportunities to migrate abroad. The mass exodus anticipated in some of the early writings on the transition process did not materialize and over the decade migration flows to the West were generally modest in comparison to original expectations. However, Albania proved something of an exception to this general rule and the country experienced a steady increase in its number of emigrants living abroad over the first decade of its transition. By the end of the decade over one-fifth of the Albanian population were estimated to be abroad, representing the largest outflow relative to population of any transitional economy. In more recent years some progress has been made in Albania as the government, under the framework of the Growth and Poverty Reduction Strategy (GPRS), embarked on reforms designed to stimulate economic growth and improve living standards. In the early years of the current decade, Albania has registered steady economic growth, reductions in the unemployment rate and a more stable inflationary environment. Structural programmes have been introduced to tackle financial regulation, land reform and privatization. In addition, there has been a strengthening of governance systems and an anti-corruption plan is in the process of implementation. In spite of some positive economic developments, poverty remains high in Albania and per capita income is one of the lowest of all the transitional countries. The World Bank’s recent poverty assessment estimated that