In this paper, we present evidence indicating that international migrant remittances lead to improved developmental outcomes. Using a cross-section of all Mexican municipalities (over 2400) in the year 2000, we show that an increase in the fraction of households receiving international remittances is correlated with better schooling and health indicators and with reductions in poverty, even after controlling for the likely endogeneity between remittances and developmental outcome variables. Our findings have important policy implications as they suggest that national governments and the international community should adopt measures that facilitate remittance flows.

What are the main issues in Chile's trade agenda? This paper argues that the country's agenda does not lend itself to that traditional kind of policy advice usually given throughout Latin America. Protection is low and uniform, institutions that govern trade policy are strong and well protected from capture and the country has put a lot of effort in opening markets in the region and abroad. The important issues that come out of the analysis are to a great extent, "second generational". That is: export diversification, the regional distribution of trade gains, completion of the "multidimensional" trade strategy and transport costs. Whereas Chile has made progress in diversifying its exports away from copper, concentration is still high even when compared to other resource intensive countries. On the regional issue, it seems clear that Chile's export-led growth in the last two decades was not evenly distributed across the regions. On Chile's "multidimensional" trade strategy, Asia is clearly the missing link in the country's wide net of preferential agreements and the evidence available suggest that transport costs are these days a more important obstacle to Chile's trade than traditional trade barriers.

There are only a few studies that analyze the complex relationship between Migration and development in Africa. The book presents the main trends in African migration since the last two decades. It analyzes the major migration trends, the various migration hubs across the continent and the underlying factors explaining the changing nature of migration across the continent. A few of the chapters in the book examine the phenomenon of migration from a national perspective by focusing on migration trends in countries such as Ghana, Cameroon, Kenya, and Nigeria. Two chapters examine the migration links between Africa and Europe with one of them focusing on the political links between Ghana and the Netherlands while the other focuses on economic exchanges between the Cameroonian diaspora in Germany and selected groups and organizations in Cameroon. The uniqueness of this book lies in the varied disciplinary viewpoints used by the authors in explaining the phenomenon of migration and development in Africa. The authors are specialists in the fields of sociology, anthropology, geography, history, philosophy and migration studies. Examining migration from so many different perspectives enriches the analysis and brings in new insights that would otherwise have been missing with the use of a single disciplinary perspective. The book recommends the need for policy coordination by national governments of both origin and destination countries to manage the size and composition of migrants. Most migrant-receiving countries prefer to receive professionals and persons with the required skills and training while keeping out the bulk of untrained and lowly-skilled persons. The result of this is that most migrants leave their countries and enter their destination countries illegally, swelling the numbers of undocumented immigrants.