JAMAICA: Remittances plunge - Flow dips to three-year low

Remittances plunge - Flow dips to three-year low

Published: Friday | August 14, 2009

Lavern Clarke, Business Editor


Remittance inflows to Jamaica have already dropped close to 16 per cent since January, and a multilateral agency is predicting that money transfer markets will continue to slide and that the drop would be widespread across Latin America and the Caribbean region.

The Inter-American Develop-ment Bank (IDB) estimates that remittances will decline 11 per cent year-on-year, based on its annual survey of migrant workers, and that this could affect some four million people funded by relatives working overseas.

Average transfers were found to have slipped from US$241 to US$230 per transaction, while the frequency is down from 15 times per year to 12 per migrant.

The IDB's Multilateral Invest-ment Fund, which tracks the flows annually starting this decade, estimates that remittances will fall to a three-year low of US$62 billion in 2009. Read more