The interior of a number 2 subway train in NYC. Photo: Kevin H. (flickr)

Jeton Qallaku, a Bronx resident, sends about three percent of his $60,000 salary back to his parents and sister in Kosovo each year. Qallaku's family mostly uses these remittance payments to keep up with their water, sewage, and electricity bills.

Jeton immigrated to New York from Kosovo in 1996, and has been sending money home ever since. Kosovo is one of the most remittance-dependent countries in the world. In 2008, remittances from Kosovar Albanian migrants accounted for 13 percent of the country's economy, according to World Bank figures. In that same year, global remittances totaled $308 million, a record high. But in the past year and a half, remittances have taken a hit as the world reels from the economic crisis.

Jounalism students at Columbia University teamed up with GlobalPost.com to profile New York area migrants to learn how the economic crisis is affecting their capacity to send money home. The students captured stories from migrants while traveling along New York's #2 subway line, which connects Brooklyn to the Bronx. Jeton's story is one of many included in this project, entitled "Payback: Remittances in New York City," but the project also features stories of migrants from Ghana, Haiti, Kosovo Albania, Mexico, Yemen, Pakistan and China. These very personal stories are told through video content and interactive maps.

Dubai's Construction Skyline at Night. Photo: twocentsworth (flickr)

The financial crisis is crimping construction in the Middle East and other places that had been experiencing a building boom, Der Spiegel reports.

Developers in Dubai — once synonymous with high profit margins and high-concept architecture — have delayed lavish developments, including a chain of palm-tree-shaped islands and a $600-million Trump hotel and tower.

The slowdown has affected the migrant workers who make up the core of Dubai's workforce, 43 percent of whom call India home. The Times of India reported that thousands of laid-off construction workers have applied for visa cancellations.

Der Spiegel says developers elsewhere in the Middle East, namely Qatar, Bahrain, Kuwait and Saudi Arabia, are scaling back as oil prices fall.

And in Moscow, developers halted construction on what was to be Europe's tallest skyscraper. The Russian economy is "a house of cards that is built on Western loans and which is now collapsing," German architect Peter Schweger told Der Spiegel.

What is the best way to measure economic development? Most economists still focus on gross domestic product (GDP) or gross national income (GNI) per capita. Bhutan has inspired some to focus on "gross national happiness" (see my earlier post on Bhutan and GNH here). Researchers at the Center for Global Development are now proposing a new measure: income per natural.

Michael Clemens and Lant Pritchett use income per natural to measure the average annual income of all individuals who are born in a given country, regardless of where they live at any given time. According to their calculations, almost 43 million people live in countries where income per natural is 50 percent higher than GDP per capita, and for over 1 billion people the difference is greater than 10 percent. Clemens and Pritchett argue that this new measure recognizes that, for many, emigration is an important means towards increased welfare.

The bottom line: migration is one of the most important sources of poverty reduction for a large portion of the developing world. If economic development is defined as rising human well being, then a residence-neutral measure of well-being emphasizes that crossing international borders is not an alternative to economic development, it is economic development.

Can migrant workers help to improve an economy? An article in the Economist says they can. According to the National Research Council with a high school education a migrant worker can contribute as much as 105,000 dollars in taxes, along with the contribution of their children once they are employed.

Migrants need health, skills, determination, a willingness to take risks and some entrepreneurial nous to take the plunge, which marks them out as special people. Moreover, migrants increasingly alleviate specific labour shortages in rich economies. Some economies could not function without foreign workers.

While the immigration debate in the United States is largely focused on the U.S.-Mexico border, an article from National Geographic looks a bit farther to the south. An estimated 400,000 migrants from Central America cross the border into Mexico every year, and though some stay to work in Mexico, most are headed for the U.S.

The economic prosperity of the U.S. has a strong pull effect on the Latin American poor, and the money that migrant workers send home to their families is having an increasingly large impact on their national economies. In Honduras, for example, remittances sent home from the U.S. made up one-fifth of the country’s gross national income in 2006.

“There is no solution to this,” a former Chiapas state official said wearily, after ticking off a list of southern border upgrade programs that have fizzled into ineffectiveness over the past decade. “You can put all the control measures down there that you want, but it’s not going to be fixed. The solution is to eliminate poverty.”