Bangladesh\'s Q1 overseas employment dips 11%

Overseas jobs for remittance-reliant Bangladesh in the first three months to March this year plunged nearly 11 percent compared to that in the same period a year ago, an official said Monday. Quoting the Bangladesh Bureau of Manpower Employment and Training (BMET) data, the official said that "96,068 people found jobs abroad in the first three months until March against 107,626 in the same period of last year." Overseas employment of March was also about 10 percent down from that in the same month a year earlier, said the BMET official who preferred to be unnamed. Some 33,358 Bangladeshis went abroad with jobs in March this year, the BMET data showed. According to sources, fresh employment opportunities for Bangladesh's foreign job seekers continued to suffer from the brunt of global financial crunch in many major traditional world markets. They said oil-rich Persian Gulf state the United Arab Emirates, which has been a sustained labor market for the last couple of years despite a global economic recession, from the middle of 2012 squeezed its doors for Bangladeshi passport holders, citing Dhaka' s failure to resolve its security concerns over identification and fake documents. Sharp fall in UAE jobs for Bangladeshis also dealt a big blow to the remittance reliant country's millions of foreign job aspirants. The latest BMET data showed only 5,210 Bangladeshis found jobs in UAE in the first quarter of 2013, down from nearly 100,000 during the same period in 2012. The country also suffered a blow in 2013 when some 409,253 Bangladeshis found jobs abroad, down from 607,798 in 2012. Bangladesh Bank Governor Atiur Rahman has recently said the growth in inflow of remittances was significantly dented during the first half of the current fiscal year 2013-14 (July 2013-June 2014) mainly due to sluggish export of manpower. Political instability in the country also played a role certainly, he said. Inflow of remittances from some 9 million Bangladeshis fell by about 6 percent year on year to 10.47 billion U.S. dollars in the first three quarters of the 2013-14 fiscal year (July 2013-June 2014), showed the official data released by Bangladesh Bank last week. The government is desperately trying to expand its labor market particularly into the East Asian countries, including Indonesia, Singapore and Brunei, said the governor. According to the central bank of Bangladesh, remittances, a major source of foreign exchange for Bangladesh, now stand at around 10 percent of the country's GDP or gross domestic product, rising from 5.0 percent of GDP in the beginning of 2000s.