Overseas Pinoys sent home $2.4B in May —BSP

Personal remittances from Filipinos abroad increased by 1.8 percent year-on-year to $2.416 billion in May, the Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas (BSP) reported Friday.

Month-on-month, money transfers were flat from $2.4 billion in April.

Alvin Ang, economics professor at the Ateneo De Manila University, said this is "still within forecasts."

The central bank is forecasting remittances to reach $26 billion for the whole year.

Total remittances in 2015 reached $28.5 billion, up 4.4 percent year-on-year. 

Personal remittances are money transfers that did not pass through formal channels like banks.

In January to May, personal remittances from overseas Filipinos totaled $11.993 billion, up 2.7 percent from $11.674 billion a year earlier.

"As long as the US dollar remittances sent home can grow at a healthy pace in peso terms, we can continue to see strong gross domestic product prints with consumption and household consumption providing a very solid base for overall growth," Nicholas Antonio Mapa, associate economist at Bank of the Philippine Islands, told GMA News Online.

Remittances continue to help fuel consumption and affords Filipinos the space to make investment in durable goods and housing, Mapa noted.

The money sent by land-based workers with contracts of one year or more totaled $9.2 billion.

Cash remittances coursed through banks reached $2.2 billion in May, up 1.9 percent.

In the first five months, cash remittances reached $10.859 billion, up 2.9 percent from a year earlier.

"The steady deployment of overseas Filipino workers remained a key driver behind the sustained inflows of remittances," BSP Governor Amando Tetangco Jr. said in a statement.

Preliminary date from the Philippine Overseas Employment Administration (POEA) showed that the number of deployed workers reached 211,799 for the period January to May.

About 80 percent of cash remittances came from US, Saudi Arabia, UAE, Singapore, UK, Japan, Qatar, Hong Kong, and Germany. — VDS, GMA News