Remittances up 3.9% to $24.6B in 9 months

Dollars sent home by expatriate Filipinos continued to rise in September as both land- and sea-based workers remitted more cash to their local beneficiaries, according to the latest data from the Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas.

The central bank said that personal remittances from Filipinos either working or living abroad hit $2.6 billion in September 2019, up 6.3 percent from the $2.5 billion reported in the same period last year.

This brought personal remittances for the first nine months of 2019 to $24.6 billion, up 3.9 percent from $23.7 billion a year ago.

“The growth in personal remittances during the nine-month period was driven by steady remittance inflows from land-based overseas Filipino workers with work contracts of one year or more, which grew to $18.8 billion from $18.2 billion in the same period last year,” the BSP said in a statement.

The data also showed that remittances from overseas workers—which are said to account for an estimated 10 percent of domestic economic activity, especially consumption—grew for every month of this year, except for a 2.7-percent decline in June.

Remittance inflows from sea- and land-based workers with short-term contracts also contributed higher at $5.3 billion this year compared to $4.9 billion a year ago, the monetary regulator added.

Similarly, cash remittances coursed through banks by overseas Filipino workers with work contracts of less than a year rose to $2.4 billion in September 2019 from $2.2 billion last year.

This drove cash remittances —which exclude transfers in cash or in kind by Filipinos who have migrated abroad—higher in the first nine months of this year to $22.2 billion from $21.3 billion recorded in the same period last year.

By type of worker, cash remittances from land- and sea-based workers increased by 3.2 percent to $17.3 billion and 8 percent to $4.9 billion, respectively.

By country source, the US registered the highest share of total remittances from January to September 2019 at 37.5 percent. It was followed by Saudi Arabia, Singapore, United Arab Emirates, Japan, the United Kingdom, Canada, Hong Kong, Germany and Kuwait.

The combined remittances from these countries accounted for 78.3 percent of total cash remittances during the period.