Relative to GDP, Guyana is one of the largest recipients of remittance flows
in the world, receiving on average 17 percent of its GDP. In past decades,
these transfers have increased considerably compared with other inflows,
including foreign direct investment and international aid. Yet little is
known about what macroeconomic factors explain their movement, or how
they impact Guyana’s economy. This article investigates the macroeconomic
determinants of remittance flows to Guyana. We estimate a

Dutch settlements on the coastal plain locked Guyana into polder agriculture and, inadvertently, ensured a small, widely dispersed population. The former requires high cost drainage, irrigation and agricultural production. The latter also implies high costs, as infrastructure, for example,—cannot be distributed over a large enough population. Wages were therefore suppressed by immigration, which increased the elasticity of supply of labour, and facilitated the playing off of one ethnic group against the other.