Personal remittances hit $17.9 billion in January to July

September 15, 2017

Personal remittances from overseas Filipinos (OFs) amounted to $2.6 billion in July, posting an 8.7 percent increase year-on-year.

On a cumulative basis, personal remittances from OFs for  January-July rose by 5.9 percent to reach $17.9 billion, Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas Officer-in-Charge Diwa Guinigundo announced Friday.

The steady growth in personal remittances drew support from the remittance inflows from  land-based OF workers with work contracts of one year or more, amounting to $13.8 billion, and compensation of sea-based workers and land-based workers with short-term contracts (excluding their expenditures abroad), which reached $3.6 billion.

Similarly, cash remittances from OFs coursed through banks, aggregating $2.3 billion in July, were higher by 7.1 percent than the level recorded in the same month last year.

Cash remittances from land-based workers (at $1.8 billion) and from sea-based workers (at $0.5 billion), posted 6.8 percent and 8.4 percent growth, respectively, compared to the levels reported a year ago.

By country source, the primary contributors to the growth in cash remittances during the month are the United States (with 3.3 percentage points contribution to growth), United Arab Emirates (UAE) (1.1 percentage points), Singapore (0.8 percentage point), and  Japan (0.6 percentage point).

On a year-to-date basis, cash remittances posted 5 percent growth, reaching $16.1 billion in January to July.  Cash remittances from both land-based and sea-based workers summed up to $12.8 billion and $3.3 billion, respectively.

Cash remittances coming from the United States, Saudi Arabia, UAE, Singapore, Japan, United Kingdom, Qatar, Kuwait, Germany and Hong Kong comprised about 80 percent of total cash remittances from January to July.

The sustained increase in OF remittances was supported by stable demand for skilled Filipino workers abroad.

Preliminary data from the Philippine Overseas Employment Administration (POEA) showed that for the period January-July, the total number of deployed OF workers reached 1,222,003 which is about 58 percent of the total number of OF workers deployed for the year 2016 at 2,112,331. DMS