Remittances have become one of the largest financial flows to the Global South, surpassing official development assistance and rivaling foreign direct investment in many countries. Yet mainstream development theory remains largely unable to explain its broader political and economic consequences. Combining a range of interdisciplinary research, this book demonstrates how remittances transform class relations, state strategies, financial systems, and everyday livelihoods while simultaneously reproducing global inequalities and new forms of dependency.

The book argues that remittances are not simply household transfers but a distinct form of transnational rent that is reshaping development trajectories across the Global South. Drawing on a novel surplus approach and original field research in El Salvador, the Philippines, and Togo, it develops the concept of remittance-led development to explain how migration, monetary transfers, and social reproduction increasingly substitute for productive transformation. In doing so, the book challenges capital-centered understandings of development and advances a new theory of rent societies as historically specific political-economic formations structured around the governance and distribution of surplus.

This book will be essential reading for scholars and students of development studies, global political economy, migration studies, comparative political economy, and international development, as well as policymakers seeking to understand the changing relationship between migration, inequality, and development in the twenty-first century.

Hannes Warnecke-Berger is a political economist at the University of Kassel, Germany, and Managing Director of the Käte Hamburger Kolleg “Rohstoffwelten”. His research focuses on global inequalities, development theory, rent societies, migration and remittances, extractivism, and global and comparative political economy. Based on extensive fieldwork in Latin America, Southeast Asia, and West Africa, he develops cross-area approaches to understanding contemporary transformations of the global economy. He also directs the international research project EXTRACTIVISM and has published widely on rents, surplus structures, resource politics, and social reproduction.