Remittances hit $1.5b in February

REMITTANCES from the nearly 10 million Filipinos overseas hit $1.5 billion in February, up 6.2 percent over the same period last year despite the political tensions in the Middle East, the Bangko Sentral said Friday.

The demand for Filipino workers abroad was sustaining the strong dollar inflows the monetary authority said.

“Remittance flows into the country continued to draw strength from the steady demand for Filipino manpower abroad,” Bangko Sentral Governor Amando Tetangco Jr. said.

The February result brought the two-month total to nearly $3 billion, representing a growth of 6.9 percent from the $2.59 billion registered in the same two-month period in 2010, Tetangco said.

Data from the Philippine Overseas Employment Administration showed that 43,360 job orders were processed as of the end of March 2011 in response to the manpower requirements in Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Kuwait, and Taiwan.

Remittances grew 8.2 percent to $18.8 billion in 2010, and could top more than $20 billion on an 8 -percent growth in 2011, the Bangko Sentral said.

Officials said around 1.363 million Filipino workers were deployed in the January-November period last year, up by 2.7 percent from 1.327 million. Most of them were land-based workers who were deployed in Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Hong Kong, Qatar and Singapore.

But Aurelio Montinola III, president and chief executive of Bank of the Philippine Islands, warned that external developments could slow the growth of remittances from Filipinos working in other countries.

“We have to be practical. Most likely, the growth will be single digit this year,” Montinola said.

He said the Philippines had yet to feel the impact of the developments in Libya, Tunisia, Egypt and Japan.

“I think over time, precisely because the [remittance] industry has grown to a very large level, at $18.8 billion, at some point in time there will be a bit of plateauing,” Montinola said.

The Asian Development Bank expects remittance flows to rise by only about 5 percent this year.