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The money to be sent home by overseas Filipino
workers (OFWs) would amount to $15 billion this year, the government
said Friday.
The rising number of Filipinos
working all over the world would assure that their remittances to
the Philippines would surpass the $14.449-billion benchmark in 2007,
said Labor Secretary Marianito Roque, in a report to Malacañang
released Friday.
According to a report released
earlier by the Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas, OFW remittances have
reached the $4-billion mark for the first quarter of this year.
Roque said the distinct global
preference for OFWs in more than 190 destination countries has
sustained the inflow of dollar remittances annually.
The Bangko Sentral’s remittance
report showed that global OFW deployment has surged by 13.6 percent
to 263,129 in the first quarter of 2008, from 231,647 during the
same period in 2007.
Meanwhile, the latest preliminary
report of the Philippine Overseas Employment Administration showed
that the global deployment of both land- and sea-based Filipinos
rose by 14 percent, with an average of 3,303 deployed worldwide
daily, to 399,638 from January to April 2008, from 350,520 during
the same period last year.
“Thus, in 2008, as the global
preference for our highly skilled overseas Filipino workers sustain,
we are confident that total global OFW deployment would reach or
surpass the one-million mark, and total global OFW remittances would
approach the $15-billion level, as the year successfully
progresses,” the Labor chief added.
Currently, more than eight
million Filipinos are working all over the world. In 2007 alone,
global Filipino deployment rose to 1.073 million, or one percent
above 1.062 million deployed worldwide in 2006.
--XINHUA
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