July cash remittances up 6% to $2.1 billion in July

AFP FILE PHOTO

MANILA, Philippines — Filipinos abroad sent back home cash worth $2.063 billion in July—the biggest amount on a monthly basis so far in 2014.

Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas (BSP) data released Monday showed that cash remittances coursed through banks last July exceeded by 6.0 percent the $1.946 billion sent home by Filipinos overseas during the same month in 2013. It was the second straight month that cash remittances exceeded the $2-billion mark.

From January to July, cash remittances totaled $13.485 billion, up 5.8 percent from $12.746 billion in the same seven-month period in 2013.

The BSP noted that cash remittances from land-based workers grew 5 percent to $10.3 billion, while those from sea-based employees rose 8.5 percent to $3.2 billion.

Almost four-fifths of July’s cash remittances were from Canada, Hong Kong, Japan, Saudi Arabia, Singapore, United Arab Emirates (UAE), United Kingdom and United States, the BSP disclosed.

The robust cash remittance flows came “on the back of stable demand for skilled Filipinos abroad,” the BSP said, citing Philippine Overseas Employment Administration data showing that job orders during the January to July period hit 540,037. Over two-fifths of the overseas jobs bagged by Filipinos were in the production, professional, service and technical sectors in the countries of Kuwait, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Taiwan and UAE.

The BSP added that the continuous expansion of bank as well as non-bank remittance service providers both internationally and domestically sustained cash remittance flows.

Personal remittances from Filipinos abroad, meanwhile, went up 7.1 percent to $2.284 billion in July from $2.132 billion in the same month in 2013.

According to the BSP, personal remittances “measure the total amount of remittance flows into the country, including cash and non-cash items that flow through both formal (via electronic wire) and informal channels (such as money or goods carried across borders).”

As of the end of July, personal remittances reached $14.958 billion, 6.4-percent higher than the $14.063-billion haul during the first seven months of last year.

“The continued expansion in personal remittances during the first seven months of 2014 was mainly due to the steady increase in remittance flows from both land-based workers with long-term contracts (by 5 percent) and sea-based and land-based workers with short-term contracts (by 8.4 percent),” the BSP said.

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