Philippine remittances reach 8.2 bln USD in Q1

Source: Xinhua | 2020-06-13

Personal remittances or the money sent home by overseas Filipinos amounted to 2.652 billion U.S. dollars in March 2020, down 5.2 percent year-on-year, the Philippine central bank said in a report.

The Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas (BSP) said in a statement on Thursday that this brought the total remittances for the first quarter of 2020 to 8.218 billion U.S. dollars, up 1.5 percent year-on-year.

The BSP said personal remittances from land-based workers with work contracts of one year or more declined to 2.014 billion U.S. dollars in March 2020, 6.7 percent lower than 2.157 billion U.S. dollars recorded in March 2019.

Meanwhile, the BSP said remittances from sea-based workers and land-based workers with work contracts of less than one year rose by 2.7 percent to 0.591 billion U.S. dollars from a year ago.

Similarly, the BSP said the overseas Filipinos cash remittances that are coursed through banks declined by 4.7 percent to 2.397 billion U.S. dollars in March 2020 from 2.514 billion U.S. dollars in March 2019.

"The decline in cash remittances in March was largely due to the lesser number of Filipinos deployed overseas in the first three months of 2020 relative to the comparable level last year," the BSP statement said.

Notwithstanding the decline in March, the BSP said cash remittances for the first quarter of 2020 managed to post a modest increase of 1.4 percent to 7.403 billion U.S. dollars from the same period last year.

The BSP said the slight growth for the quarter was supported by remittances from both land-based (5.79 billion U.S. dollars) and sea-based (1.613 billion U.S. dollars) workers, which rose by 1.3 percent and 1.8 percent, respectively.

The United States registered the highest share to overall remittances at 39 percent in March 2020, according to the BSP.

The government estimates the number of overseas Filipino workers at 12 million, accounting for one-tenth of the country's population.

BSP data showed that personal remittances sent home by overseas Filipinos in 2019 reached a record high of 33.5 billion U.S. dollars, 3.9 percent higher than the 32.2 billion U.S. dollars recorded in 2018.

Remittances from overseas Filipino workers are forecast to decline as industries such as tourism bear the brunt of lower demand due to the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic.

The impact of COVID-19 on other countries is expected to be felt in the Philippines via tourism, aviation, trade, and overseas Filipino workers' remittances.

Nearly 40,000 overseas Filipino workers, both sea-based and land-based, have been repatriated due to the pandemic, data from the Philippine Department of Foreign Affairs (DFA) said.

DFA data showed that as of June 11 a total of 5,469 Filipinos in 51 countries and regions have contracted the virus.

The Asian Development Bank has projected the remittances from overseas Filipino workers, equivalent to 9 percent of GDP, to slow this year due to COVID-19. Large flows of remittances come from the United States, Europe, and the Middle East, which collectively supply 70 percent of all remittances, the ADB said in a report released in April.