April remittances up 12% to $2.6B
MONEY sent home in April by overseas Filipino workers (OFWs) rose from a year earlier but declined from March, the Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas (BSP) reported on Monday.
Personal remittances, which sum up the net compensation of OFWs, personal transfers whether in cash or in kind and also capital transfers between households, totaled $2.616 billion for the month.
The result — 12.9 percent up from the $2.317 billion posted a year earlier but down 0.41 percent from March’s $2.627 billion — took year-to-date remittances to $10.426 billion, 4 percent higher year on year.
“The continued growth in personal remittances during the first four months of 2018 was driven by steady remittance inflows from land-based OF workers with work contracts of one year or more, which aggregated to $8.1 billion, and compensation of sea-based workers and land-based workers with short-term contracts, which reached $2.1 billion,” the Bangko Sentral said in a statement.
Cash remittances, which only count money sent home via banks, rose by 12.7 percent to $2.347 billion from $2.083 billion a year earlier.
The rise was attributed to 15.1-percent and 4.8-percent increases, respectively, in transfers from land- and sea-based workers.
The countries that registered the biggest contributions in cash remittances for April were the United States, Canada and Singapore.
Year to date, cash remittances stood at $9.353 billion, up 3.5 percent from the comparable 2017 period.
The post April remittances up 12% to $2.6B appeared first on The Manila Times Online.