Finance Minister Vicente Bengoa told reporters from Hoy that Dominican immigrants have sent back ten times more money than all the disbursements made by international financial institutions over the past eleven years. The remittances totaled US$17.8 billion and the disbursements from the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB), the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) amounted to just US$2.1 billion. Even more important to Bengoa was the fact that the remittances are interest-free and unconditional. The minister said that at the present time, remittances are the most important single factor in the Dominican economy. He called the remittance flow “continual support for the Dominican economy from people who are looking for better horizons overseas, but never forget their own.”