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Thursday, March 16, 2006
OFWs send over $900M to country
MANILA — A huge overseas work force sent nearly a billion dollars in cash to their families in the Philippines in January, up 16.5 percent from a year earlier, the Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas (BSP) said yesterday.
January remittances reached $917 million, compared to $787 million in the same month last year, BSP Gov. Amando Tetangco Jr. said in a statement.
“Information gathered from commercial banks indicates an increasing amount of remittances used for direct payments of investments in Philippine assets,” he added.
These banks are also improving services to meet the financial service requirements of families who have relatives working abroad, Tetangco said.
“The impact of these positive developments more than compensated for the dampening impact of decreased deployment” of Filipino workers to 98,971 in January, when the number of deployed land-based overseas workers fell 9.8 percent to 77,931.
Foreign-based Filipinos remitted a record $10.7 billion dollars last year.
But a shrinking industrial sector pushed the country’s unemployment rate up to 8.1 percent in January, the government said yesterday.
This means, 2.8 million Filipinos were unemployed in January.
The jobless rate stood at 7.4 percent in October, the latest previous figure.
Agricultural employment rose by 475,000 jobs or 4.2 percent from a year earlier to 11.8 million, while services increased 2.4 percent to 15.67 million.
A total of 95,000 jobs were lost in the industrial sector — including 73,000 in construction — reducing employment there to 4.88 million.
The ratio of people who worked for less than 40 hours a week, officially defined as the underemployed segment, rose to 21.3 percent compared to a year earlier. (AFP)
For Bisaya stories from Cebu. Click here. (March 16, 2006 issue)
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