Overview
Remittance Prices Worldwide is a resource sponsored by the World Bank Group that provides data on the cost of sending remittances from 48 remittance sending countries and 105 receiving countries. Information provided includes exchange rate and transfer fees, as well as the speed of transfer. On this website, there is also an online tool that allows an individual to find and compare prices for the transfer of money from a selected sending country to a selected receiving country. *
*This description is a paraphrased version of the description on the Remittance Prices Worldwide website.
Available data file formats
Excel.
Accessibility
This resource requires submission of an online form to request access to the data. Otherwise, it is free and open to the public.
How to retrieve data by example
Scenario
Suppose you wish to obtain data on the costs of sending and receiving remittances from Brazil to Bolivia for the most recent time period.
Step-by-step
Go to Remittance Prices Worldwide and on the right side of the screen, select the sending country (Brazil) and the receiving country (Bolivia) in the FIND AND COMPARE PRICES box. Click Show.
- This will produce a table of information on sending money from Brazil to Bolivia specifically for a given quarter of the year. The default quarter is the most current quarter the data is available for. To change the year and quarter, go to the Collection period for drop-down menu and select the desired time period.
- This online tool will allow you to view the data for remittances prices between two specific countries without downloading the entire dataset.
- To download the data the entire dataset, click on the DATA DOWNLOAD tab at the top.
- On this page, the second paragraph contains a bolded sentence that reads “To request the file, please submit this form.” Click on the link that reads this form.
- Complete the form with your information, accept the terms of use and click Submit.
- You will then receive an email with instructions and a link to access the dataset. Once you click on the link and are taken to the new page, click on the dataset to access the data from 2011 to Q4 2018 (as of March 2019). The data will download to your computer in the form of an Excel file.
- The Excel spreadsheet will have several sheets containing the following information: Terms of Use, Methodology, Legend, Countries and the dataset divided into the last two sheets.
You should now have access to the raw data on remittance prices from Brazil to Bolivia, as well as the full dataset for 2011 to 2018.
Be sure to consult with the source website on how to properly cite your data. For this scenario, the citation is provided on the DATA DOWNLOAD page and is generic for any data used from this site. It is the following:
The World Bank, Remittance Prices Worldwide, available at http://remittanceprices.worldbank.org