Overseas worker remittances up 19.1% in April

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Overseas worker remittances up 19.1% in April
Posted: 4:47 PM Jun. 15, 2005
Agence France-Presse

INCREASED deployment of Filipino workers abroad helped raise their salary remittances to the Philippines by 19.1 percent from a year earlier to 790 million dollars in April, the central bank said Wednesday.

Remittances for the four months to April rose 17.2 percent to 3.1 billion dollars, it said in a statement.

These are mainly due to the "double-digit growth in deployment of both land-based and sea-based workers in April" as well as "seasonal transfers for the school enrollment period" ahead of the June 2005 opening of the school year.

Cumulative worker deployments abroad rose 3.8 percent to 344,058 in the first four months of the year, with service workers accounting for 42.7 percent of the total, 29.4 percent professional or technical workers, and 24.1 percent factory workers.

The government hopes to deploy more than a million Filipino workers abroad this year. One in 10 Filipinos now work or live abroad.

The central bank said the bulk of the remittances for the first four months came from the United States, Saudi Arabia, Italy, Japan, Britain, Hong Kong, Singapore, and the United Arab Emirates.