Expat Filipinos’ dollar remittances continued tepid growth in Nov 2018

MANILA, Philippines – Dollars sent home by expatriate Filipinos increased only slightly in November of last year, thus maintaining a shallow growth trajectory that has been playing out since first quarter of 2018, data from the central bank showed.

According to the Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas (BSP), personal remittances from overseas Filipinos in the eleventh month of 2018 grew by 2.4 percent year-on-year to $2.6 billion.

On a cumulative basis, personal remittances in January-November 2018 reached $29.1 billion, or 2.9 percent higher than the level posted a year ago, BSP officer-in-charge Maria Almasara Cyd Tuaño-Amador said Tuesday.

The growth in personal remittances during the first eleven months of 2018 was supported by remittance inflows from land-based overseas Filipinos with work contracts of one year or more and remittances from sea- and land-based workers with contracts of less than one year that increased by 2.8 percent and 4.0 percent, respectively.

Meanwhile, cash remittances rose by 2.8 percent year-on-year to $2.3 billion in

November 2018.

The central bank said countries that contributed most to the increase for the month were Canada and the United States.

For the first eleven months of 2018, cash remittances reached $26.1 billion, or a 3.1 percent increase compared to the $25.3 billion registered in the same period in 2017. Cash remittances from both land-based ($20.5 billion) and sea-based workers ($5.5 billion) recorded increments of 2.8 percent and 4.1 percent for January-November 2018, respectively.

The bulk of cash remittances for the first eleven months of 2018 came from the US,

Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates, Singapore, Japan, United Kingdom, Qatar, Canada, Germany, and Hong Kong. Cash remittances from these countries accounted for almost 79 percent of total cash remittances.

Personal remittances represent the sum of net compensation of employees (i.e., gross earnings of overseas Filipino workers with work contracts of less than one year, including all sea-based workers, less taxes, social contributions, and transportation and travel expenditures in their host countries), personal transfers (i.e., all current transfers in cash or in kind by workers with work contracts of one year or more as well as other household-to-household transfers between Filipinos who have migrated abroad and their families in the Philippines), and capital transfers between households (i.e., the provision of resources for capital purposes, such as for construction of residential houses, between resident and non-resident households without anything of economic value being supplied in return). /kga