Negative Growth for the First Time

Recession in investments, dismiss of new employment in abroad, continuous decreases of dollar rate are drowning up the remittances flow due to political unrest. It is seen in years based remittance flows that the trend of negative growth happened for the first time in the last year.

Bangladesh Bank found that the immigrants sent about 13.83 billion dollars as remittances in 2013. However, in the previous year 2012 14.17 billion, the dollar came from the immigrants as remittances. So 3 percent less remittance was received in last year compared to the previous year. 2013 is the first year to have negative growth. Otherwise, remittances increased in every other previous year compared to their previous one.

The concerned people think that from the beginning of the last fiscal year; immigrants were sending more remittances due to the increased rate of a dollar, but nowadays, the rate of a dollar has decreased and so that immigrants are sending less remittance than the previous years. The current political unrest has created a non-favorable investment environment in the country. On the other hand, manpower exportation is also less in the labor market. For this reason, they think that there might be a decrease in remittances last year.

According to the ‘Foreign-Currency Currency Policy Department’ of Bangladesh Bank, 3.18 billion dollars in 2003, 3.57 billion dollars in 2004, 4.29 billion dollars in 2005, 5.48 billion dollars in 2006, 6.56 billion dollars in 2007, 8.98 billion dollars in 2008, 10.72 billion dollars in 2009, 11 billion dollars in 2010, 12.17 billion dollars in 2011 came to Bangladesh as remittances. It is seen that the remittance flow was positive in every year of the last 10 years.