The impact of international informal banking on Canada

The views expressed are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Commission nor of the Nathanson Centre. [...] The accuracy of the information contained in this paper is the sole responsibility of the authors. [...] One of the members of the relief organization that was coordinating the work on the ground in the North-eastern part of Sri Lanka and a Sri Lankan representative of the Toronto Money transfer agency were also on air via telephone from Sri Lanka. [...] The Rothschild family banks operated more like an informal bank in the 19th century in the manner they settled their accounts dealing with money transfer at the end of the year.4 At $450 billion US, the annual economic output in the early 1990s of the 55 million Chinese overseas was estimated to be roughly equal to that of the 1.2 billion people in China itself (Seagrave 1995). [...] With the intensification of transnational migration in the latter part of the twentieth century, the informal system has spread to the cities of the global north.