Indian diaspora economics: The entanglement of economics with culture

This chapter departs from the observation that the transfer of resources by diaspora communities is driven by cultural forces, underscoring that culture and economics are highly entangled. A major implication of this observation is that competition is constrained, thus ruling out that behaviour is (entirely) market-driven. Returns on investments (and remittances) are anticipated but not always in monetary terms as rates of investments. Rather than focussing on the developmental effects of the resource transfer or its policy relevance, the chapter will probe the mechanism of cultural bonding that enables transfers. That is to say, the chapter is first and foremost conceptual. Furthermore, the chapter argues that the transferred resources enhance the bonding effects as they include social and cultural returns that are contained in the specific nature of diaspora markets, the forms of capital, ethnic businesses, tourism, ethnic services such as religion and medicine, and Bollywood.