Overseas job market for Bangladeshis still in doldrums

Overseas employment for Bangladeshis still remains stuck in the doldrums, with no lift at all in demand from major traditional world markets which felt the pinch of recession, an official said here Wednesday.
"A total of 207,957 Bangladeshis found jobs abroad in January- June this year, down from 208,340 people during the same period in 2013," an official of the country's Bureau of Manpower Employment and Training (BMET) told Xinhua.
Of the total overseas employment in the six months, the BMET official who requested to be unnamed, said that more than two- thirds of Bangladeshi workers found jobs in Bahrain, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Oman, Singapore and Qatar.
Some 37,848 people found overseas jobs in June, up 11.11 percent from a year earlier, he said.
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.
Before the wounds from recession recovered, they said, Bangladesh suffered a fresh blow.
The United Arab Emirates, which has been a sustained labor market for the last couple of years despite a global economic recession, squeezed its doors for Bangladeshi passport holders from mid-2012, citing Dhaka's failure to resolve its security concerns over identification and fake documents, they said.
The latest BMET data showed 11, 536 Bangladeshis found jobs in the oil-rich Gulf country in the first six months of 2014, down from nearly 200,000 a year earlier.
As the UAE jobs dried up, the official said, overseas employment for Bangladeshis in the second half of 2012 fell by nearly 23 percent to some 232,961.
The country suffered a blow in 2013 when some 409,253 Bangladeshis found jobs abroad, down from 607,798 in 2012.
Officials attributed the current sliding remittance growth to sluggish overseas employment.
The flow of inward remittances in the 2013-14 financial year ( July 2013-June 2014) fell about 1.61 percent to 14.23 billion U.S. dollars.
Sources said the decrease in total inflow of remittance was due mainly to sluggish overseas employment and political instability surrounding the country's Jan. 5 national elections.