British bank Standard Chartered said remittances from overseas Filipinos likely grew faster in April than a month ago, led by sustained inflows from Asia and the Middle East.
Standard Chartered said in a report Tuesday remittance growth in April might have improved to 4.1 percent year-on-year from 1.5 percent in March.
“Remittances from Asia grew 50.1 percent [year-on-year] and remittances from the Middle East grew 41.1 percent in the first quarter of 2016. However, remittances from the US remained sluggish, falling 29.1 percent in the first quarter and offsetting growth from other regions,” the bank said.
“We are concerned about remittance growth this year, and expect the current account surplus to narrow to 2.5 percent of GDP from 2.9 percent in 2015,” the bank said.
The government is set to release the remittance data for the month of April on Wednesday.
Money sent home by overseas Filipinos grew 4.4 percent in the first quarter to $6.55 billion from $6.28 billion a year ago, on sustained demand for skilled workers abroad.
Cash remittances in March alone rose modestly by 1.5 percent to $2.42 billion from $2.39 billion, representing the slowest growth since the 1.3-percent rise in September 2015.
Cash remittances from both land-based and sea-based workers grew by 5.3 percent and 1.5 percent, respectively. More than three-fourths of cash remittances came the United States, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Singapore, Hong Kong, the United Kingdom, Japan, Qatar and Kuwait.
Personal remittances, which include non-cash items, also grew 4.3 percent in the first quarter to $7.2 billion from $6.9 billion a year ago. In March alone, personal remittances increased 1.4 percent to $2.67 billion from $2.64 billion last year.
Preliminary report from the Philippine Overseas Employment Administration showed that total processed job contracts reached 2.3 million in 2015, of which 1.2 million were deployed in the same year.
Cash remittances grew 4.6 percent to a record $25.767 billion in 2015 from $24.628 billion in 2014, surpassing the 4-percent growth projection of Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas. It also accounted for around 10 percent of gross domestic product in 2015.
Bangko Sentral set a 4-percent remittance growth target for 2016.