Saturday, August 16, 2008 [ philstar.com ]
Overseas Filipino workers (OFWs) sent $1.5 billion home in June, the highest ever recorded since 1989, bringing the total remittance level to $8.2 billion for the first six months of the year.
Data from the Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas (BSP) showed that remittances from OFWs coursed through banks grew year-on-year by 30 percent in June 2008, the highest level since the BSP started tracking remittances.
Since 1989, the BSP said it began classifying foreign exchange (FX) inflows from overseas workers as a separate category in the BSP’s forex statistical monitoring system.
Remittances have been consistently surpassing the $1-billion mark for nearly a year and the June inflows brought the six-month remittance level higher by 17.2 percent compared with last year’s first semester total.
BSP Governor Amando M. Tetangco Jr. attributed the robust remittance inflows to Filipinos with higher paying jobs like nurses sending money home for enrollment in the new school year.
Quoting preliminary data from the Philippine Overseas Employment Administration (POEA), Tetangco said there was a 33.5-percent increase in the deployment of workers abroad in the first half of the year.
This year, over 640,000 workers left the country to work abroad, compared with 479,725 for the same period last year, as the government opened bilateral talks with labor-importing countries to open up more employment for Filipinos.
Tetangco said the level of remittances also drew strong support from the expanded presence of local banks and non-bank remittance agents in countries with large concentration of OFWs.
To date, the United States, Saudi Arabia, the UK, Italy, the United Arab Emirates, Canada, Japan, Singapore, and Hong Kong remain the major sources of remittances.
The BSP expects remittances to buoy the country’s forex reserves this year, despite heavy portfolio investment outflows, a large trade deficit and lackluster foreign direct investments.
Tetangco said the BSP is maintaining a projected GIR level of $36.5 to $37 billion, adding that net outflows in portfolio investments are expected to be tempered by stronger than expected OFW remittances.
Besides these inflows, he said the central bank also expects inflows from tourism and the business process outsourcing (BPO) industry.
The BSP said its foreign exchange operations and investments abroad also generated additional foreign exchange that boosted the reserves in July.
However, these receipts were partly offset by outflows arising mainly from payments of maturing foreign exchange obligations of the National Government and the BSP.
The BSP said the current GIR level is enough to cover six months of imports of goods and payments of services and income. It is also equivalent to 5.2 times the country’s short-term external debt based on original maturity and three times based on residual maturity.
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