A piece of news was indeed eye-catching on 1 July. It underlined that in the just ended financial year, 2019-20, Bangladesh reaped its highest ever recorded level of remittance in a year at $ 18 billion. Specially, remittance flow was noted to be extraordinarily heavy in the last two months. This was sought to be explained as eagerness on the part of remitters to send to their near and dear ones greater amounts to relieve them in the difficult times of the corona threat. Others explained that remitters were sending home their savings as they face uncertainty of continuing in their host country. But is there an all important factor in motivating our workforce to sender bigger amounts. Surely there is : greatly improved and facilitated system of sending and receiving remittance through the official system.
Tens of thousands of Bangladeshis have been leaving their homes, seeking a greener pasture abroad- where they will get a job with higher income and greater savings. They are doing so to be able to remit a big part of their incomes to their family members back home. They want to be part of some 10 lakhs strong Bangladeshi expatriate labor force who are scattered all over the world, but particularly in different countries in the Middle East, North Africa and South East Asia.
Over the last two decades, the brave contribution of our economic migrants to our national economy has grown through their remittances. The record revealed that during the 2014-15 fiscal year, there was US Dollar 15.31 billion of remittances to Bangladesh. This figure was the highest ever at that time in our history and represented a valuable increase of US Dollar 1.8 billion over the level of the previous financial year.
This was an important achievement, but more so, because it was despite a decline in the number of people leaving the country for employment abroad. Research carried out by ‘The Daily Star’ as quoted in its editorial of 4 July, 2015 stated that “from a peak of 9.8 lakh in FY 2008 through 6.9 lakh in FY 2012, the number of migrants (staying abroad for work) “dropped to 4.1-4.2 lakh in FY 2014-15”. This equation deserves further attention, because while there was a steady fall in the numbers going abroad, the country has also had to cope with increasing number of workers returning back to Bangladesh. This dynamics resulted partially due to the effects of political violence in the countries they were working in the Middle East and North Africa or because of the effects of recession that affected the world economy in that period.
Considering the above evolution, one can only surmise that there has been an increase in remittance notwithstanding these negatives because of a better, efficient and regulated handling of remittances from different sources. It suggested that the migrant work force was beginning to use more formal channels than the previous “Hundi” format to repatriate their resources to Bangladesh. One must in this context note that the fine-tuning of the banking arrangement initiated by our Bangladesh Bank worked as an important catalytic factor in our workers switching from the previous informal channels to formal ones. And this trend of higher remittance flow is continuing strongly exclusively because of better management of official remittance inflows.
This process has also gained enthusiastic acceptance because the delivery channel of inward remittances to the beneficiaries has improved due to the ever expanding use of mobile banking by commercial banks and their facilitation measures. Another reason for higher remittance flow has been the stable US Dollar-Taka exchange rate. Commenting on this increase, The Bangladesh Bank pointed out that it, as part of the moves, is allowing local banks to establish exchange houses and drawing arrangement abroad to assist the officialinflow of remittances.
