Remittances from Pinoy workers declining—ADB

The Asian Development Bank has warned about a decline in remittances from migrant Filipino workers in the coming years amid a slowdown in deployment of Filipino professionals abroad and drop in inflows from several Asian countries.

The bank in a paper noted a drop in the deployment of professionals since 2006. “Lower salaried services and construction workers are currently supporting the sustained level of remittance inflows,” it said.

It said countries showing declines in remittance inflows had been the top labor markets for the Philippines in the last two decades, including Saudi Arabia, Hong Kong, Singapore, Qatar, Kuwait and Taipei.

“A sustained decline in their inflows will mean an eventual decline in overall remittances,” it said.

The Philippines, according to ADB, was now one of the world’s largest recipients of remittances, receiving about 12 percent of its gross domestic product through this channel in 2008.

“These flows have become the single most important source of foreign exchange to the economy and a significant source of income for recipient families,” it said.

Nearly a tenth of the Philippine population live outside the country as seen in any given time in the last decade. This has led to an influx of remittances that have helped support domestic production and consumption and pushed foreign exchange reserves to an all-time high of $38 billion at the end of 2008.

However, the bank said that toward the end of 2010, the Philippines will have completed a generation of international migration and remittance experience.

It said that in the early years of temporary migration, demand for workers was generally for low-skilled and technical workers, but with the changing global economic landscape, the demand for Filipino labor subsequently followed the growth of individual labor-importing countries. –Roderick T. dela Cruz, Manila Standard Today