Money remittances from overseas Filipino workers (OFWs) declined in March amid the government’s repatriation of Filipino workers from the Middle East.
The Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas (BSP) said total cash remittances from OFWs reached $2.4-billion in March, a drop of 9.8 percent from last year’s $2.6-billion. This comes on the back of the 9.7 percent drop in remittances from land-based OFWs and the 10.2 percent decline in transfers from sea-based Filipino workers.
“The continued repatriation of overseas Filipino workers from the Middle East countries could have affected the inflows of cash remittances,” the BSP said in a statement.
The countries that registered the biggest declines in cash remittances were Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates, and the United States.
According to the Department of Labor and Employment’s data, as of early February, 1,124 overseas workers were repatriated back to the Philippines from Kuwait. Many more followed in the following weeks.
BSP also attributed the decline to the lesser number of banking days due to Holy Week.
“Further contributing to the decline was the lesser number of banking days in March 2018 compared to the same month in 2017 since the celebration of the Holy Week happened during the last week of March as opposed to April in 2017,” the BSP explained.
Despite the decline in this month’s total OFW remittances, the outstanding total for the first three months of the year stands at $7 billion, up 0.8 percent from the same period last year.
Remittances from the US, UAE, Japan, Singapore, United Kingdom, Canada, Qatar, Germany and Hong Kong make up 80.1 percent of current total OFW remittances.
