Bangladesh is the ninth highest recipient of remittances this year with US$ 15.9 billion and in South Asia it ranks third after India ($79.5b) and Pakistan ($20.9b), the World Bank said in a report Saturday, reports UNB.
Bangladesh experienced strong upticks of 17.9 per cent in 2018, the bank said.
In its latest Migration and Development Brief, the World Bank said Bangladesh, after a steep decline in 2016 (-11.5 per cent), remittances were flat in 2017, but remittances are showing a brisk uptick in 2018 (17.9 per cent).
The Bank estimates that officially-recorded remittances to developing countries will increase by 10.8 per cent to reach $528 billion in 2018.
However, the pace of migrant worker deployments from Bangladesh for the first three quarters of 2018 slowed by 25 per cent (0.55 million, compared with 0.73 million in the same period in the previous year).
The report also noted that the Malaysian government postponed hiring Bangladeshi workers from September 2018, claiming the system was abused by a cartel of 10 recruitment agencies in Bangladesh who charged workers nearly 10 times the allowable recruitment fees of TK 40,000 (approximately $471).
The government of Bangladesh has recently signed a memorandum of understanding with Nepal agreeing that employers, rather than the migrant workers themselves, will bear the full cost of hiring, said the Bank.
Meanwhile, the Bank also mentioned that although refugee movements into the European Union have abated, other regions have seen dramatic increases in refugee numbers. Since August 2017 over 720,000 Rohingyas have fled Myanmar and taken refuge in Bangladesh.
"This has placed enormous pressures on their host communities," it added.
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