Remittance Income and Social Resilience among Migrant Households in Rural Bangladesh

This book examines how migrant remittances contribute to household social resilience in rural Bangladesh. Using a mixed methods approach, the authors show that remittances play a crucial role in enhancing the life chances and economic livelihoods of rural households, and that remittance income enables households to overcome immediate pressures, adapt to economic and environmental change, build economic and cultural capital, and provide greater certainty in planning for the future. However, the book also reveals that the social and economic benefits of remittances are not experienced equally by all households. Rural village households endure a precarious existence and the potentially positive outcomes of remittances can easily be undermined by a range of external and household-specific factors leading to few, if any, benefits in terms of household social resilience.

Mohammad Jalal Uddin Sikder is an assistant professor at the General Education Department at the University of Liberal Arts Bangladesh (ULAB) as well as a senior research fellow at the Refugee and Migratory Movements Research Unit (RMMRU), University of Dhaka, Bangladesh. He has published several books and articles on migration, remittances, and development and climate change in respected international journals. He has also been involved in a number of studies under the Migration out of Poverty RPC at the University of Sussex, UK.

Vaughan Higgins is an associate professor of sociology at Charles Sturt University, Australia. His research interests encompass the sociology of science and technology, and the sociology of agriculture and food. He is co-editor of Food Security in Australia: Challenges and Prospects (2012), Assembling Neoliberalism: Expertise, Practices, Subjects (2017) and author of a wide range of journal articles.

Harry Ballis was head of Gippsland Business School, Federation University, Australia. Prior to that he worked as a senior lecturer in sociology at the School Applied Media and Social Sciences (SAMSS), Monash University, Australia. His research interests are in the areas of accounting and accountability; sociology of religion; work and organisations; and sociology of health. His recent publications include: Ethno Medicine and Dominant Medicine in Multicultural Australia: A Critical Realist Reflection on the Case of Korean-Australian Immigrants (2007); Challenge and Excitement – part one: Loving and Hating Rural Medicine (2009).