FAQ
How much do Bhutanese abroad send home?
A great deal, relative to the size of the economy. The Australian Bhutanese diaspora alone sends home an estimated USD 240 million a year — equivalent to about 6.9% of all national savings arriving from a single overseas country, every year, against a total domestic deposit base of roughly USD 3,500 million. 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 roughly 6.9% 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.