Abstract
International airtime top-up transfers enable prepaid mobile phone users to send top-ups and data bundles to users in other countries, as well as make payments, in real time. These are heavily used by migrants to financially assist their families in their home countries and consequently could be a valuable source of information for migration and mobility analysis. However, top-up transfers are understudied as a form of money remittance in migration. In this paper, we explore the determinants and the potential of top-up transactions to complement remittance and migration statistics. Our results show that such data can provide insights into migrant groups, particularly for irregular migration and for estimating the real-time distribution of migrant groups for a given country.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Pages (from-to) | 319-336 |
| Number of pages | 18 |
| Journal | International Journal of Data Science and Analytics |
| Volume | 19 |
| Issue number | 2 |
| Early online date | 25 May 2023 |
| DOIs | |
| Publication status | Published - 2025 |
Bibliographical note
Publisher Copyright:© 2023, The Author(s).
Funding
We thank DT One for their cooperation. This study is supported by European Union’s Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation Programme under Grant Agreement No. 870661. We thank Dr. Özge Bilgili, Dr. Didem Gündoğdu, Dr. Almila Akdağ Salah and anonymous reviewers for their valuable comments.
| Funders | Funder number |
|---|---|
| Horizon 2020 Framework Programme | 870661 |
Keywords
- Airtime top-up transfers
- Migration
- Mobile phone data
- Remittances