Upgrading Bangladesh's Remittance Model: How Skills, Migrant Stock, and Training Capacity Shape Remittances, 2025–2045

Bangladesh is among the world's largest labour-exporting countries, with record remittance inflows of US$30.3 billion in fiscal year 2024–25. Its remittances per emigrant, about US$3,100 in 2024, appear far below the Philippines' US$5,800, a gap often attributed to skills. This paper tests that gap and asks how much a skills-led migration strategy could add by 2045. It rebuilds the labour-migrant stock from UN DESA 2024 bilateral data, compares observed remittances by sending country from both countries' central banks, and builds a transparent accounting model of remittances, expressed in real and nominal terms, decomposed into migrant-stock, skill-composition and pay effects, and tested against a stock-flow model of departures and returns. Four findings stand out. First, of 8.9 million Bangladesh-born people abroad, 2.3 million live in India and remit little; on a like-for-like basis, counting land-based workers' recorded remittances and excluding the India-resident population, the per-migrant gap with the Philippines largely disappears, while within the Gulf Filipinos remit an estimated 8–29 percent more per person. Second, inflation and migrant-stock growth alone would take nominal remittances to about US$60 billion by 2045, so nominal targets of that size say little about strategy. Third, a high-success scenario that raises the skilled share of the migrant stock from about 22.5 to 50 percent yields about US$19 billion a year more than the status quo in constant 2025 dollars, but only about US$11 billion of that comes from the higher skilled share; the rest, and 58 percent of total real growth, comes from a larger stock. Fourth, a training plan of 345,000 graduates a year by 2035 would raise the skilled share only to about 28 percent; reaching 50 percent would require roughly 940,000 graduates a year under the model's central assumptions, a capacity estimate rather than a forecast. The paper sets out corridor priorities, institutional responsibilities and domestic health-workforce safeguards consistent with these constraints, and documents the model assumptions and calculations for scrutiny.