Send money from South Korea


We are continuing our list of articles and study about “Where do these guys send money to”. And let’s remind it, we study this because it says a lot about the population. “The heart of a population is where they send the money” said Aristote during the first World War, after having cut his own ear. This is a joke by the way don’t mind me.

As always, let’s start by guessing where South Korea would send most of their money. My grand mother would say : “They should not send their money anywhere, money has to be spent in the country it has been earned” with her angry accent, yes, I was there for Christmas and the discussion were always turning around nonsense. Let’s guess, and I promise I didn’t see the results. So first, I remember from my history classes that South Korean used to be colonised by the Japanese and even if a lot of bad things happened during the colonization, it mixed the population and the countries are still tight together. China as a neighbourhood country, and so huge, who colonised most of earth, not by force but culturally (you can find a Chinatown in every big capital (maybe except some African countries I would say). There must be also a lot of workers from Philippines as they are everywhere. What about North Korea? This is not an easy question, officially nothing should come across but there must be some informal connection between the countries. The data from the World Bank would not take this into account anyway. They rely on government and money transfer operator source mostly. In this way, when Bangladesh government decided to reduce the cost of remittance and people started to transfer using legal ways, the data from the World bank made a jump, as if remittance increased one day from another, but this is not the case.


Let’s see the result : the first country to receive money from South Korea is… China… with more than 4 billion dollars every year. This is far far far away from the second country Vietnam ($575 Million). Who would have guessed? Then Philippines with $215 Million, Thailand $173M, United States of America $161M, Japan finally with a weak $105M, I’m a little bit disappointed here, Mongolia, Sri Lanka and Indonesia.

Wow, so much emotion, so much surprised, I’m like every time, KO after discovering this. It’s incredible, it’s terrific, we know a lot more about Korea now and the future might tell more about all of this for sure.