Cash sent by Filipino migrant workers in September this year proved to be the biggest thus far and once more demonstrated its resilience no matter the decline in sea-based worker deployment for the period.
The Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas (BSP) reported late Tuesday on cash remittances coursed through banks having grown 6.7 percent in September.
While this represented a slow down from the previous month’s 16.3-percent expansion, this much foreign-currency earnings sent home by overseas Filipino workers (OFWs) was the highest monthly remittance for the year at $2.38 billion.
The bulk of the amount sent home originated from the United States, the United Arab Emirates, Japan, Qatar, Taiwan and Kuwait.
Remittances continued to grow despite the contraction in the cash sent by sea-based OFWs during the period.
In particular, the remittances of sea-based workers declined by 10.5 percent from remittances sent Philippine-bound the previous year.
The BSP said the declining remittances from sea-based workers may be traced to a parallel decline in the supply of seafarers.
According to the central bank, a growing number of officers and ratings, or mariners without certificates of competence, are recruited from out of East Asia (particularly from China and India) and Eastern Europe (especially from the Ukraine, Croatia and Latvia).
The decline in the cash sent by sea-based workers was offset by the 11.9-percent rise in the remittances sent by land-based workers during the period.
The remittance in September pushed the total remittances received by the Philippines in the first nine months to $20 billion, or 4.8 percent higher than the $19.1 billion reported in the same period last year.
On Monday the sovereign credit watcher Moody’s Investor Service highlighted the practical implications of the US election’s outcome to the Philippine economy and its credit standing, particularly citing its potentially impact on remittances.
“A policy shift that would disrupt immigration into the US would be credit negative for countries more highly dependent on remittance flows, including El Salvador, the Philippines and Vietnam,” Moody’s said.