Migrants send home record cash

Bangladeshis working abroad sent home a record 937 million dollars in August despite a global recession that has dried up overseas jobs, bank officials said Sunday.
Remittances are Bangladesh’s second-highest earner after exports and have been credited for a sharp decline in poverty in the nation of 144 million people.
“This is the highest monthly remittance we have received in our history,” deputy central bank governor Ziaul Hasan Siddiqui told AFP.
The August figure topped that for June, when the country received 919 million dollars in remittances from its more than 6.5 million migrants, most of them in the Middle East and South East Asia.
The deputy governor said overseas workers sent home more money to their families ahead of the biggest Muslim festival, Eid al-Fitr, and the major Hindu religious celebration of Durga Puja.
“The figure also shows that the global recession had little impact on the flow of remittance to Bangladesh although job opportunities in the major markets have declined in recent months,” he said.
The government said the number of overseas jobs for Bangladeshi workers had plunged 30 percent in the eight months to August as major job markets in the Middle East, Malaysia and Singapore were battered by the global downturn.
The World Bank, the International Monetary Fund and the Asian Development Bank had earlier forecast lower remittances in 2009.
In the financial year ended in June, Bangladeshis working abroad sent home a record 9.7 billion dollars, accounting for more than 10 percent of gross domestic product.
 
Courtesy of AFP, DHAKA