MANILA, Philippines — The central bank yesterday reported that remittances sent by overseas Filipinos grew 5.5 percent year-on-year to $9.26 billion as of the end of May.
For the month of May alone, personal remittances increased 5.2 percent to $1.97 billion from the same period last year, and 4.28 percent from April this year.
Last month, the BSP refined the treatment and computation of fund transfers from abroad to better capture the numbers and they now prefer to call it “personal remittances”. The BSP changed the way it looked at remittances data in line with the refinement measure recommended under the International Monetary Fund’s Balance of Payments and International Investment Position
Manual, 6th edition, which provides the framework for the compilation of the balance of payments.
The BSP has also started including remittances via the banking channels in its official announcements, which as of end-May amounted to $8.3 billion, up 5.3 percent year-on-year. The difference from the overall personal remittances data came from the informal channels. The BSP has always reported the numbers from both banking and non-banking channels but the non-banking channels are not included in the press statement.
In a statement, BSP Governor Amando M. Tetangco Jr. said land-based Filipino workers with at least one-year contracts with their current employers sustained the steady growth in personal remittances. The sea-based OFWs with short-term contracts, in the meantime, increased their fund transfers by 14.7 percent to $1.9 billion compared to land-based workers’ 2.7 percent increase to $6.4 billion.
The BSP said the US continue to be the major country sources of cash remittances from land-based workers accounting for 28.9 percent, followed by Canada (10.1 percent), Saudi Arabia (7.6 percent), the United Arab Emirates (3.9 percent), Japan (3.4 percent), the United Kingdom (3.2 percent), and Singapore (3.1 percent).
“The continued stream of remittances emanated from the strong global demand for professional and skilled Filipino workers,” said the BSP. Based on preliminary data from the Philippine Overseas Employment Administration, as of end-June the approved job orders totaled 395,336 and about 29.1 percent are processed job orders for service, production, and professional, technical, and related workers.
Majority of these processed job orders were recruitments for Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Kuwait and Taiwan. “Another contributory factor to the favorable trend in remittances is the continued expansion of banks’ remittance network abroad through additional partnerships with foreign banks, money transfer operators and other remittance agents,” said the BSP.
Tetangco said earlier that while forecasts for foreign exchange reserves and BOP have been revised lower for 2012, there are no plans of revising the five percent remittances growth forecast for this year.
The projection is still $21.1 billion. Last year, remittances grew 7.2 percent to P20.11 billion.
source: mb.com.ph
