Bangladesh remittance to grow by 8pc in 2020 despite pandemic : WB
Business Desk: Bangladesh’s remittance earnings are projected to grow by 8 per cent to nearly $19.8 billion in 2020 despite a sharp decline in global inflows, according to a latest report of the World Bank.
‘In Bangladesh, the negative impact of the COVID-19-induced global economic slowdown has been somewhat countered by the diversion of remittances from informal to formal channels due to the difficulty of carrying money by hand under travel restrictions as well as the incentives to transfer remittances,’ WB said in the report released on Friday.
The global lender made the projection in a brief on migration and development tilted ‘COVID-19 crisis through a migration lens.’
The share of Bangladesh’s remittance earnings to the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) is also projected to grow by 6.2 per cent in 2020 from 5.8 per cent in 2019.
Earlier in April this year, the global lender forecasted that the remittance earnings of the country would record a steep decline by around 22 per cent to only $14 billion in 2020 from $18.3 billion in 2019 due to negative impact of coronavirus pandemic.
The ‘Haj effect’ seems to have affected remittance flows to Bangladesh in July 2020 but the country’s remittance earnings recorded a whopping 53.5 per cent year-on-year growth, the report said.
The reason behind the growth was the damage from the floods that inundated more than a quarter of the country’s landmass, which pushed the expatriate workers to send more money to the country.
Other plausible explanations include pent-up remittances after the shutdown in Q2 and a shift in flows from informal to formal channels, it added.
Remittance costs from United Arab Emirates to Bangladesh and Singapore to Bangladesh are the two, out of five, lowest cost corridors in the world while Pakistan to Bangladesh corridor is one of the highest-cost corridors.
