Hello there, I'm Ed Butler and welcome to Business Daily from the BBC.

Today, remittances, those tiny cash flows that put together are keeping the poor world moving.

Migrants send about 10 to 20% of their income and even that small amount of money, $200 or $100 a month,

that adds up to a lifeline to millions of poor people.

The money sent home by migrant workers, it's reached record levels, but is it the best way to keep the poor world afloat?

With remittances, you have this unerent income that comes and puts everything up on steroids.

People that didn't have money, now they have money.

We're actually affecting people's incentive to work.

For richer and poorer, sending the cash home business daily from the BBC.

The world is expected to reach a little heralded statistical landmark this year.

The amount of money that's sent by migrant workers back to their families

will for the first time become the largest source of foreign earnings

for poor countries around the world.

More than foreign direct investment, three times more than foreign aid.

$690 billion altogether. The rising tide

of these remittances, as they're known, affects everyone. It reflects an increasingly globalised economy.

We're looking at it today on Business Daily, how those payments work, but also how necessary

they've become economically. They are a million stories around them, of course.

But here's one that we've dug out, a representative one we reckon. Monica, she's a nurse born in

the Philippines. She's spent the last five years living and working in Stockport in the UK.

From there, she sends a decent chunk of her earnings back to relatives outside Manila every year.

Most of us, my classmates, go to America, and some of them are in Saudi Arabia, some of them here in UK.

...