Remittances up 3.2% YOY in H1

Cash remittances from overseas Filipinos sent through the banking system amounted to $13.2 billion as of end-June, up 3.2 percent year-on-year (YOY), the Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas (BSP) announced yesterday.

For the month of June alone, cash remittances went up 4.8 percent yearon-year to $2.3 billion.

In a statement, the BSP said cash remittances from land-based and sea-based workers totaled $10.4 billion and $2.8 billion, respectively. “About 80 percent of cash remittances came from the US, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Singapore, the United Kingdom, Japan, Qatar, Kuwait, Hong Kong, and Germany,” it said.

Personal remittances, in the meantime, rose by 3.1 percent year-on-year for the first six months to $14.6 billion.

The monthly remittances (June) grew by 4.8 percent to $2.6 billion in June 2016.

According to the BSP, personal remittances from land-based workers with work contracts of one year or more amounted to $11.3 billion while “compensation of sea-based workers and land-based workers with short-term contracts” and this is excluding their expenditures abroad, was at $3.1 billion.

Citing Philippine Overseas Employment Administration data, the BSP continue to see continued demand for skilled Filipino workers. During the first half of the year, deployed employees for overseas numbered 223,116 for landbased (new hires) and 93,600 for sea-based workers.

“The number of deployed land-based (new hires) workers increased by 0.9 percent year-onyear, while that of seabased workers declined by 55.6 percent compared to the year-ago level,” noted the BSP.