RemittancesGateway.org

Bangladesh - Record remittance takes forex reserve to all time high

Tuesday, 06 July 2010 14:52

Source: The Financial Express

Bangladeshis working abroad sent home a record US$11billion in the just concluded fiscal year, as remittance continued to rise despite declining trend of manpower export, officials said Monday.

Remittances sent by Bangladeshis working abroad reached $10.973 billion, a record in the country's history, in 2009-10, marking a 13.25 per cent growth over the previous fiscal.

The remittances were estimated at $877.95 million in June last, a fall by $25.10 million from the previous month. In May 2010, the remittances were worth $903.05 million, according to the central bank statistics released Monday.

"We expect that the existing inflow of remittances may continue in the new fiscal year," a senior official of the Bangladesh Bank (BB) told the FE, adding that the central bank is continuously working to increase the flow of inward remittances.

The country's foreign exchange reserve stood at an all time high at $10.81 billion Monday, thanks to a robust growth of remittances from the expatriate Bangladeshis, the BB officials said.

"Channeling the overseas workers' income through legal routes also helped scale up the remittance inflow," another BB official said, adding that the central bank has enacted stringent anti-money laundering laws and encouraged commercial banks to tie up with overseas exchange houses in the past few years.

With most of the Gulf and south-east Asian countries facing the brunt of the global recession, jobs for Bangladeshis in their main manpower markets declined by over 34 per cent to 427,202 in the fiscal year that ended on June 30, according to the official figures.

The flow of remittance in fiscal 2009-10 was a continuation of the trend in the last fiscal year when the country received a record $9.689 billion. The growth in 2008-09 was 22.42 per cent over the previous fiscal.

Currently, some private commercial banks along with the state-owned commercial banks are increasingly trying hard to channel the remittances from the Middle East, the United Kingdom, Malaysia, Singapore, Italy and the United States to Bangladesh.

"We're serious to increase the inflow of remittances through official channel to meet our internal foreign exchange demand," Managing Director of the National Credit and Commerce (NCC) Bank Limited Nurul Amin told the FE.

Mr Amin also said some banks are trying to set up their own exchange houses or drawing arrangements with overseas companies located in different parts of the world.

"We're searching for new destinations from where remittances can be sent to the country by our nationals," he said, adding that there is no alternative to meet the increased import payments without remittances.