million increase in the number of poor Filipinos (to 27 .6 million l.o:,2006), according to the National Statistical Coordination Board (NSCB). The poverty incidence measured in percentage terms also even increased from 30.0% of the population in 2003 to 32.9% n 2006. Migration and remittances involve large numbers of OFWs and vast sums of money. Yet these are essentially disconnected from local economic activity and are beyond much of the population these greatly limit their possible contribution to sustainable domestic development. Migrants go abroad, work abroad, and send back money to be spent. This is in contrast to agriculture or domestically- grounded industry which involves interacting with different economic units and sectors domestically, as well as creates valuable technological, multiplier and synergistic effects - these are necessary to build solid economic foundations. Peso for peso the income earned from economic activity actually occurring in the country is more developmentally meaningful than from remittances merely received from abroad. The limits of migration and remittances are little mitigated by efforts to leverage the contribution of remittances at the microeconomic and macroeconomic levels - i.e., improving migrant entrepreneurship, encouraging savings, pooling remittances for private and public investment projects, and so on. Indeed there are several factors negating the theoretically positive multiplier effects. There is not much of capital left behind for reinvestment with remittances largely going first to household debt repa5rments then to basic subsistence consumption expenditures on food, rent, education and health care. The lack of meaningful investment prospects in the country means that the largest part of 'investment' by OFWs is in mainly small-scale service sector activities such as tricycles, jeepneys, taxis, street restaurants and sari-sari stores. These are minimally productive in a deeper macroeconomic sense, generate few jobs and result in minimal domestic capital formation. The multiplier effects of local spending are also limited by how much of these go to imported goods in the absence of domestic industry. Any supposed 'brain gain'is moreover somewhat exaggerated inasmuch as few migrants are really in skilled work and even fewer are in skilled work with technologies appropriate to the Philippine context. Technology transfer also goes far beyond just individual migrants 'knowing'the technology and includes having the (expensive) legal license to use these, the local resources to materialue thenr, and the opportunities to put the technologies into practice. l8