FAQ
How much do Bhutanese abroad send home?
A great deal, relative to the size of the economy. Bhutan received USD 343 million in formal remittances in 2025, and USD 253 million of it — 74% — came from Australia alone. That single-country flow equals about 7.2% of a domestic deposit base of roughly USD 3,500 million, and it is still accelerating: the 2025/26 fiscal year closed at USD 417 million, up 72% on the year before. Remittances have quietly become one of Bhutan's largest external income streams after hydropower — yet there is no formal policy framework built around them.
A flow worth more than 7% of the national deposit base, arriving every year from one country, is not pocket money — it is a structural pillar of the balance of payments. But because it arrives household by household rather than through a state channel, it is largely invisible to policy: no diaspora-bond programme, no remittance-investment vehicle, no formal recognition of what the overseas cohort is doing for the home economy.
That gap — a major income stream with no architecture around it — is the subject of Paradox #8, set against the diaspora’s scale in Paradox #48.