Migrants as Transnational Investors: Understanding Entrepreneurial Remittances

This paper examines migrants' remittances for entrepreneurial investments (REIs), focusing on the mechanisms that shape both entrepreneurial intention and its translation into actual business investment in countries of origin. While remittance behaviour has been widely studied, less attention has been devoted to migrants' entrepreneurial engagement and to the factors enabling the shift from intention to implementation. Using original survey data on 2,122 first-generation migrants residing in Italy, the analysis adopts a staged framework distinguishing between non-intenders, intenders, and actual investors.Our findings indicate that entrepreneurial remittances appear more widespread than often assumed in the literature. Transnational engagement and return orientation significantly increase the likelihood of developing entrepreneurial intentions, highlighting the strategic and forward-looking nature of these projects. Most importantly, the transition from intention to implementation is primarily associated with migrants' entrepreneurial capabilities, opportunity perception, and perceived institutional constraints, rather than with demographic characteristics or general transnational orientation alone. Overall, the results support a staged interpretation of entrepreneurial remitting and underscore migrants' role as strategic transnational economic agents, with important implications for diaspora entrepreneurship policies.