Overseas Pinoys send home more money due to calamities

MANILA, Philippines - Due to recent calamities that hit the country and the coming Holiday season, Filipino workers in Canada and other countries have sent home more money to their families back home.

The country’s largest labor group yesterday reported that it has revised its previous projection of a drop in remittances from Filipino workers abroad.

“We are revising upward the expected remittances from OFWs, in view of stronger-than-expected inflows from Canada and Japan, as well as parts of Europe,” said Trade Union Congress of the Philippines secretary-general and former Senator Ernesto Herrera.

Herrera noted that the recent natural disasters that hit the country have driven many overseas Filipino workers (OFWs) to send more money to their families here for housing repairs and recovery spending.

He then estimated that the 2009 remittances from OFWs would grow by $500 million to $1 billion from last year’s figure of $16.426 billion.

TUCP previously projected a five to 10-percent drop in remittances this year mainly due to the lingering economic slump in the US, which is the country’s largest source of foreign inflows from migrant workers.

Of the $16.426 billion wired home by all OFWs from all parts of the globe in 2008, 48 percent or $7.825 billion came from those.

According to the Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas, OFWs sent home through banks a total of $12.789 billion in the first nine months of the year, up $516.62 million or 4.21 percent from the $12.273 billion they remitted during the same period in 2008.