Blockchain technology in the remittance ecosystem: A bibliometric and visualization based analysis

Abstract

Critical and Emerging Information Technologies (CEITs) greatly influence the current global transforming financial industry and for that matter, blockchain technology is one of the emerging concepts in the financial sector. This technology holds great potential to transform the remittance industry which is an integral part of migration studies in economics. The remittance industry face longstanding challenges like high costs of transaction, slow transaction speeds, limited transparency and financial exclusion, all of which affect the vulnerable populations disproportionately. The study therefore explores the potential solutions in adopting blockchain technology in this industry. This study also examines the bibliometric corpus of research articles on blockchain technology and its role in the remittance industry. Bibliometric analysis is used to study the growing area of research and topics that have been most commonly studied. A total of 109 studies were selected of the time span of 2010- 2024. The VOSviewer software was used to produce the bibliometric results. The findings revealed a deeper understanding of the topic by examining the literature on blockchain technology in the remittance industry, thereby analysing current trends, future research directions, and policy implications. This topic gained popularity in 2017, where a high volume of research was initiated in developed nations such as the United Kingdom and China. The contribution of this study is two-fold, first it aims to contribute in advancing the scholarly understanding and practical pathways for leveraging blockchain technology to achieve financial stability in remittance industry; and secondly, it paves way for future researchers to explore more, thereby leading to ways to achieve the Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) target 10.c, that aims to reduce the transaction costs of remittances by less than 3 percent by 2030.