Extra-EU personal transfers reach €43.5 billion in 2022

In 2022, flows of money sent by EU residents to non-EU countries, referred to as personal transfers, amounted to €43.5 billion (bn), an increase of 14% compared with €38.2 bn in 2021. Inflows to the EU totalled €13.5 bn, an increase of 10% compared with €12.4 bn in 2021. Personal transfers consist of flows of money sent by migrants to households of their country of origin.

Recently, a substantial growth of extra-EU outflows was observed, especially in the last five years. From 2018, outflows have surged by 41%, while inflows have demonstrated a more modest growth pattern with an increase of just 15%. As a result, there has been a widening negative balance for the EU vis-à-vis non-EU countries, reaching €30.0 bn in 2022. 

This information comes from data on personal transfers and compensation of employees published by Eurostat today. This article presents a handful of findings from the more detailed Statistics Explained article.

Source dataset:  bop_rem6

Weight of net personal transfers of the EU economies

In 2022, personal transfers resulted in a surplus for 9 EU countries as their inflows exceeded outflows. Among those countries 4 reported a surplus representing more than 1% of their respective gross domestic product (GDP): Croatia (2.8% of GDP), Bulgaria (1.4%), Portugal (1.4%) and Romania (1.3%).

Source datasets: bop_rem6 and nama_10_gdp

In contrast, Cyprus (-0.9%), Malta and Spain (each -0.6%) exhibited the largest deficits of personal transfers vis-à-vis the rest of the world as a share of their respective GDP.