THE Philippines remained among the top recipients of remittances in the Asia-Pacific region in 2020, despite the significant reduction of overseas Filipino workers (OFW) deployment during the year.
In a comprehensive report on world remittances, the World Bank said the Philippines is the second-largest remittance recipient in the Asia Pacific, second only to China.
The World Bank said OFW remittances defied earlier predictions of shrinking flows due to the pandemic.
“A key factor behind this resilience was the growth by 5.5 percent of inflows from the United States, by far the largest source of remittances to the Philippines by almost 40 percent in 2020. Positive growth in remittances from the United States and Asia helped to mostly offset declines from the Middle East and Europe, which fell by 10.6 percent and 10.8 percent respectively in 2020,” the World Bank said.
“The decline from the Middle East reflects the absence of formal safety nets available to migrant workers in the face of the pandemic and the large repatriation of overseas Filipino workers,” it added.
This is in contrast to the projected 7.9-percent fall in Asia Pacific remittances in 2020.
The World Bank noted that the country’s strong remittance number also represents a bucking of the trend given the fall in deployment of Filipino migrant workers last year.
“Over in the Philippines, overseas deployment was estimated to have fallen by 70 to 75 percent in 2020 according to preliminary official estimates. In 2020, an annual cap of 5,000 was temporarily imposed on the overseas deployment of newly hired health-care workers to ensure adequate numbers of medical personnel to meet domestic pandemic response efforts,” the World Bank said.
Also, as of mid-March, a total of 390,917 Filipino migrant workers returned home from over 90 countries and 150 ships due to the pandemic, according to the World Bank, citing data from the Department of Foreign Affairs (DFA).
Latest data from the Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas (BSP) showed that Filipino migrant workers were able to increase their remittances back home in February this year, as larger economies around the world start to recover and reopen.
In particular, cash remittances to the Philippines hit a total of $2.48 billion in February. This is 5.1 percent more than the remittances sent to the country in February 2020 at $2.36 billion.
Broken down, cash remittances from land-based workers increased by 7.8 percent to $1.982 billion, while that of sea-based workers decreased by 4.6 percent to $495 million.
The BSP said the growth in cash remittances for the first two months of the year largely emanated from remittances coming from Filipinos in the US, Malaysia and Singapore.