South Asian Remittance Data

Monthly data on remittance inflow to South Asian countries (Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, the Maldives, Nepal, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka) from their partner countries is collected from January 2018 to December 2022 from the Central Bank database. As an alternative to monthly GDP data, monthly Industrial Production Index (IPI) data is used instead as a proxy for GDP. This is because monthly GDP data is not available. Monthly IPI data was collected from International Financial Statistics by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) for South Asian countries and partner countries (Singapore, Malaysia, Japan, Italy, and the UK). Libya and Middle Eastern nations, however, don't have monthly IPI statistics. Since the economies of those countries are heavily dependent on oil production, we created the Oil Production Index as a proxy for GDP. World Bank and EIA monthly crude oil price and production data are used to calculate Oil Production Index. Distance and standard gravity control variables like population, contiguity, and common language are taken from the Dynamic Gravity datasets constructed by the United States International Trade Commission. Migration stock data is collected from the Bureau of Manpower Employment and Training (BMET) and the International Organisation of Migration (IOM). We collect exchange rate data from the Central Bank dataset. To tackle the issue of different currency units, a Bilateral Exchange Rate Index (BERI) is constructed, where the exchange rate of each month for each country is divided by the exchange rate of the base year of that particular country. Furthermore, COVID cases, COVID mortality, and COVID vaccination data are collected from the Our World in Data website.