MANILA - Overseas Filipino workers (OFWs) sent a record high of $1.5 billion in remittances in March despite gloomy predictions of a sharp drop due mainly to the deepening global economic and financial turmoil, the chief of the Central Bank of the Philippines reported.
Bank Governor Amando M. Tetangco revealed that the amount remitted in March represented the highest that the close to nine million OFWs had sent to their families back home for any one-month period.
“While concerns remain over the impact of the prevailing global economic crisis on the deployment of Filipino workers abroad, the latest data so far points to sustained demand for such workers overseas,” Tetangco stressed.
He did not elaborate but he was apparently referring to the warning by the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank that OFW remittances could suffer a severe drop as host nations start to retrench or lay off foreign workers due to the global recession.
But the Central Bank stood firm on its projections that it does not expect OFW remittances to shrink, mainly because of rising labor demand in the so-called alternative markets abroad.
Diwa Gunigundo, the bank’s deputy governor, admitted that although the global downturn has led to massive job losses in the US and Europe, he said other countries were strengthening their work forces, particularly in the construction and health care sectors.
Among these countries, Gunigundo said, are Canada, New Zealand, Qatar, Bulgaria and Australia which recently announced job openings for OFWs and other foreign workers.
Also, he said that Saudi Arabia has announced demand for thousands of construction workers as it aims to develop infrastructure in its key cities.
For his part, Tetangco was even more optimistic, explaining that the OFW remittance flows, which constitute about 10 percent of the country’s gross domestic product, continued to be shored up by the steady labor demand for skilled OFWs.
The increase, Tetangco said, could likewise be attributed to the wider access to expanded money transfer services by the OFWs and their families in the Philippines.
He added that if historical records would hold, remittances in the next two months could even go higher, saying that OFWs tend to send more money to their families ahead of the enrollment season.
The Department of Education had announced that school year 2009 to 2010 would officially start on June 1, involving a total of about 20 million students in the elementary and high school.
Citing data from the Department of Labor and Employment, Tetangco disclosed there was a 27.3 percent rise in the number of OFWs deployed in the first two months of this year.
He said there was also an increase in the total job orders as of May 12, 2009, with almost 37 percent, or 279,889 already processed and 63 percent still to be filled up.
Estimates by the labor department showed that more than 6,000 OFWs were sent home in 2008 as factories closed down when they started feeling the adverse impact of the global recession.
But Tetangco pointed to latest data which indicated that the number of OFWs being retrenched has slowed down.
But more than that, Tetangco said new job opportunities for OFWs have arisen partly as a result of labor agreements that have been signed between the Philippine government and host countries such as Canada, Australia, Japan, Korea and some Middle East countries like Qatar.
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