DHAKA: Some 208,340 Bangladeshis found overseas jobs in the first half of 2013, a decline of over 44 per cent over the same period last year, an official said.
“Some 208,340 people found jobs abroad in January-June this year, down from 374,832 during the same period in 2012,” said an official of the country’s Bureau of Manpower Employment and Training (BMET).
He said some 34,063 people found overseas jobs in June this year, down about 36 per cent compared with the same month in the previous year.
The BMET official who requested anonymity said that, of the total overseas employment in the first six months of 2013, more than two-thirds of Bangladeshi workers found jobs in Oman, Singapore and Qatar.
Officials said that although remittance inflows from nearly 9 million Bangladeshis, living and working in about 100 foreign countries, set a new record in the 2012-13 fiscal year, growth rates still remained moderate compared with the previous years.
They attributed the current sliding remittance growth to the falls in overseas employment. Quoting provisional data, a Bangladesh Bank (BB) official said that remittances from the Bangladeshi wage earners abroad during the 2012-13 fiscal year stood at about US$14.46 billion, about 13 per cent higher than the same period a year ago.
He said that over the past few years until the 2009-2010 fiscal year, Bangladesh’s remittance growth hovered around 15-30 per cent.
Another BMET official said Bangladesh suffered the crucial blow as employment opportunities for the country’s millions of foreign job aspirants in the UAE came to a near halt.
“Only 5,713 people found jobs in the UAE in January to June, down from 168,685 during the same period in 2012,” said the official, quoting the latest BMET data.
The UAE, which hosted 2.29 million Bangladeshi workers as of May since 1976 – the second highest number after Saudi Arabia – has been a sustained labour market for the past couple of years despite a global economic recession.
The UAE reportedly stopped issuing almost all kinds of entry permits for Bangladeshi passport holders since September last year, citing Dhaka’s failure to resolve its security concerns over identification and fake documents.
(XINHUA)
