Emigrant Remittances and Their Impact on Interwar Yugoslavia and Yugoslav Slovenia: Amounts, Transmission Channels, and Investment Patterns

The article deals with the issue of emigrant remittances in the first Yugoslavia and Yugoslavian Slovenia. Relying on the work of migration experts and scholars of the era, the article, first, evaluates the extent of remittances, the bulk of which flowed from the United States, the country hosting the majority of ‘Yugoslav’ emigrants and the place where the wage gap in relation to the sending state was the largest. Second, it examines the ways in which the Yugoslavian banking sector handled the emigrant money. Third, it explores the impact of remittances on macro and micro societal levels of the migrant-sending state. The article suggests that the lack of emigrant investment in Yugoslavia did not only result from malfunctioning sending state institutions, but rather it was primarily due to the emigrant adaptation to the United States. It thus accentuates the necessity of transnational analysis for understanding the economic impact of emigration on sending states.