Remittance Modality: Unpacking Canadian Money Transfer Mechanism Choices
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Numerous international development targets aim to encourage and formalize remittances, because they can support development efforts while controlling and monitoring illicit capital flows. Despite continued efforts to promote formal remittance channels, informal remittances flourish among specific population groups. This study uses data from the Canadian Study on International Money Transfers to analyze the determinants of remittance modality or channel choice. Previous empirical work tends to classify remittances as either formal or informal. In contrast, this article considers a variety of channels. It shows that the dichotomization of formal versus informal remittances masks crucial differences across remittance channels. Due to Canada's unique geographical positionality, cash transfers operate distinctly from informal methods despite often being treated as a homogenous group in other studies. Interestingly, remitters are also more likely to use formal money transfer operators (most of which offer cash pickup options to recipients) than informal channels to send funds to countries with larger informal sectors. Within the context of Canadian remittance outflows, this invalidates the frequent assumption that more informal destination country economies push remitters to opt for informal transfer methods.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.004 | 0.008 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".