Comment by Riaz Haq on November 14, 2021 at 5:07pm

Overseas worker #remittances to #Pakistan continue to remain robust, stand at $2.5b in October 2021, up 10.2% from October 2020. Remittances sent home by overseas #Pakistanis residing in the #US soared 26.4%.
https://tribune.com.pk/story/2329421/remittances-continue-to-remain...

The remittances sent home by overseas Pakistan surged 10.2% in October 2021 to $2.5 billion on a year-on-year basis owing to measures taken by the government and the State Bank of Pakistan to encourage the use of formal channels to send money home.

According to the data released by the State Bank of Pakistan (SBP) on Sunday, the inflow of remittances had stood at $2.3 billion in the same month last year.

“In addition to staying above $2 billion since June 2020, this is the eighth consecutive month when remittances have been close to or above $2.5 billion,” SBP said in a statement. “Proactive policy measures by the government and SBP to incentivise the use of formal channels and altruistic transfers to Pakistan amid the pandemic have positively contributed towards the sustained improvement in remittance inflows since last year.”

However, the inflows declined 5.7% on a month-on-month basis as they had amounted to $2.67 billion in September 2021.

Speaking to The Express Tribune, Ismail Iqbal Securities Head of Research Fahad Rauf said that the trend of remittances has remained robust for the past few months.

“While regional countries witnessed a drop in remittance inflows in the last few months, Pakistan recorded a sustained uptrend in receipts,” he cherished citing that the current number was encouraging for economic managers of Pakistan.

Speaking about the month-on-month decline, he pointed out that a slowdown in growth was being witnessed due to resumption of cross border travel in the world.

However, he held firm hope that Pakistan would record receipt of $30 billion from overseas Pakistan in full fiscal year 2021-22.

Echoing his views, Pak-Kuwait Investment Company Head of Research Samiullah Tariq stated that the month-on-month decrease was a seasonal phenomenon and increase in number of foreign flights had capped remittance flow.

During the first four months of the ongoing fiscal year (July-October 2021), remittances rose 11.9% to $10.6 billion on a year-on-year basis. The country had received $9.4 billion in the same period of previous fiscal year.

Country wise figures

According to the central bank, Pakistanis based in Saudi Arabia sent the largest amount of remittances at $655.4 million in October 2021, which was 3.25% higher than $634.8 million received in the same month last year.

The amount sent home by expatriates in UAE registered a decrease of 10% to $456 million in October 2021. Inflows from the Middle Eastern nation had amounted to $504.1 million in the same month last year.

Pakistanis in UK managed to send $346.7 million home in the month under review compared to $278.5 million in the same month last year, an increase of 24.5%.

Remittances sent home by overseas Pakistanis residing in US climbed 26.4% last month as they amounted to $231.8 million against $183.3 million in the same month last year.

Receipts from GCC countries other than Saudi Arabia and UAE inched up 4.7% to $285.6 million. The amount received from the region had stood at $272.8 million last year.

Pakistanis in European Union sent 43% higher remittances in October 2021 as the inflows amounted to $291.1 million against 203.2 million in October 2020.

https://twitter.com/ArifHabibLtd/status/1459819674980564993?s=20

Comment by Riaz Haq on November 24, 2021 at 10:02am

Nations Lure Foreigners. After #COVID19 #Pandemic, Wealthy Nations Wage Global Battle for Migrants. Several developed countries, facing #aging #labor forces & #worker #shortages, are racing to recruit, train & integrate foreigners. #Canada #Germany #Japan https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/23/world/asia/immigration-pandemic-...

As the global economy heats up and tries to put the pandemic aside, a battle for the young and able has begun. With fast-track visas and promises of permanent residency, many of the wealthy nations driving the recovery are sending a message to skilled immigrants all over the world: Help wanted. Now.

In Germany, where officials recently warned that the country needs 400,000 new immigrants a year to fill jobs in fields ranging from academia to air-conditioning, a new Immigration Act offers accelerated work visas and six months to visit and find a job.

Canada plans to give residency to 1.2 million new immigrants by 2023. Israel recently finalized a deal to bring health care workers from Nepal. And in Australia, where mines, hospitals and pubs are all short-handed after nearly two years with a closed border, the government intends to roughly double the number of immigrants it allows into the country over the next year.

The global drive to attract foreigners with skills, especially those that fall somewhere between physical labor and a physics Ph.D., aims to smooth out a bumpy emergence from the pandemic.


Covid’s disruptions have pushed many people to retire, resign or just not return to work. But its effects run deeper. By keeping so many people in place, the pandemic has made humanity’s demographic imbalance more obvious — rapidly aging rich nations produce too few new workers, while countries with a surplus of young people often lack work for all.

New approaches to that mismatch could influence the worldwide debate over immigration. European governments remain divided on how to handle new waves of asylum seekers. In the United States, immigration policy remains mostly stuck in place, with a focus on the Mexican border, where migrant detentions have reached a record high. Still, many developed nations are building more generous, efficient and sophisticated programs to bring in foreigners and help them become a permanent part of their societies.

“Covid is an accelerator of change,” said Jean-Christophe Dumont, the head of international migration research for the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, or O.E.C.D. “Countries have had to realize the importance of migration and immigrants.”

The pandemic has led to several major changes in global mobility. It slowed down labor migration. It created more competition for “digital nomads” as more than 30 nations, including Barbados, Croatia and the United Arab Emirates, created programs to attract mobile technology workers. And it led to a general easing of the rules on work for foreigners who had already moved.

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One of the sharpest shifts may be in Japan, where a demographic time bomb has left diapers for adults outselling diapers for babies. After offering pathways to residency for aged-care, agriculture and construction workers two years ago, a Japanese official said last week that the government was also looking to let other workers on five-year visas stay indefinitely and bring their families.

Comment by Riaz Haq on November 25, 2021 at 7:55am

World Bank: "Remittances to South Asia likely grew around 8 percent to $159 billion in 2021....Pakistan had another year of record remittances with growth at 26 percent and levels reaching $33 billion in 2021" #Pakistan #remittances #diaspora #migration https://www.worldbank.org/en/news/press-release/2021/11/17/remittan...

Remittances to low- and middle-income countries are projected to have grown a strong 7.3 percent to reach $589 billion in 2021. This return to growth is more robust than earlier estimates and follows the resilience of flows in 2020 when remittances declined by only 1.7 percent despite a severe global recession due to COVID-19, according to estimates from the World Bank’s Migration and Development Brief released today.

For a second consecutive year, remittance flows to low- and middle-income countries (excluding China) are expected to surpass the sum of foreign direct investment (FDI) and overseas development assistance (ODA). This underscores the importance of remittances in providing a critical lifeline by supporting household spending on essential items such as food, health, and education during periods of economic hardship in migrants’ countries of origin.

“Remittance flows from migrants have greatly complemented government cash transfer programs to support families suffering economic hardships during the COVID-19 crisis. Facilitating the flow of remittances to provide relief to strained household budgets should be a key component of government policies to support a global recovery from the pandemic,” said Michal Rutkowski, World Bank Global Director for Social Protection and Jobs.

Factors contributing to the strong growth in remittance are migrants’ determination to support their families in times of need, aided by economic recovery in Europe and the United States which in turn was supported by the fiscal stimulus and employment support programs. In the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries and Russia, the recovery of outward remittances was also facilitated by stronger oil prices and the resulting pickup in economic activity.

Remittances registered strong growth in most regions. Flows increased by 21.6 percent in Latin America and the Caribbean, 9.7 percent in Middle East and North Africa, 8 percent in South Asia, 6.2 percent in Sub-Saharan Africa, and 5.3 percent in Europe and Central Asia. In East Asia and the Pacific, remittances fell by 4 percent - though excluding China, remittances registered a gain of 1.4 percent in the region. In Latin America and the Caribbean, growth was exceptionally strong due to economic recovery in the United States and additional factors, including migrants’ responses to natural disasters in their countries of origin and remittances sent from home countries to migrants in transit.

The cost of sending $200 across international borders continued to be too high, averaging 6.4 percent of the amount transferred in the first quarter of 2021, according to the World Bank’s Remittance Prices Worldwide Database. This is more than double the Sustainable Development Goal target of 3 percent by 2030. It is most expensive to send money to Sub-Saharan Africa (8 percent) and lowest in South Asia (4.6 percent). Data reveal that costs tend to be higher when remittances are sent through banks than through digital channels or through money transmitters offering cash-to-cash services.

“The immediate impact of the crisis on remittance flows was very deep. The surprising pace of recovery is welcome news. To keep remittances flowing, especially through digital channels, providing access to bank accounts for migrants and remittance service providers remains a key requirement. Policy responses also must continue to be inclusive of migrants especially in the areas of access to vaccines and protection from underpayment,” said Dilip Ratha, lead author of the Brief and head of KNOMAD.

Comment by Riaz Haq on November 29, 2021 at 4:26pm

Power will be more concentrated in #India’s Hindi belt where #Modi is popular. “The large, poor tracts that line the northern Ganges River continue to show high fertility rates”. Already, 69% of #Indians say only #Hindi speaking #Hindu are truly Indian

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2021/11/25/india-birth-rate-re...

India’s population growth is losing steam as the average number of children born crossed below a key threshold, according to newly released data from a government survey.

India’s most recent National Family Health Survey, which is conducted every five years by the Health Ministry, was released Wednesday and showed the total fertility rate (TFR) across India dropping to 2.0 in 2019-2021, compared with 2.2 in 2015-2016. A country with a TFR of 2.1, known as the replacement rate, would maintain a stable population over time; a lower TFR means the population would decrease in the absence of other factors, such as immigration.

The figures were hailed as a heartening signal by government officials and researchers in a country that is expected to overtake China to become the world’s most populous sometime this decade. Since the mid-20th century, Indian leaders have tried to curb high birthrates, which are often reversely correlated with women’s welfare metrics and economic progress. A burgeoning population is seen, in the longer term, as a hurdle to development and a driver of environmental degradation and greenhouse gas emissions.

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Heartland misery: Four states hosting 30% of Lok Sabha seats are among the poorest. That’s a message for India

The South appears better placed. In 1991, on economic reform-eve, Bihar and Tamil Nadu were nearly at par in per capita GDP. Three decades later, TN has whittled down its multidimensionally poor to 4.9% of population while Bihar languishes at 51.9%. Jharkhand follows with 42%, UP 38% and MP 37%. The cruel governance irony of these numbers is that the four laggard states cumulatively account for 30% of seats in Lok Sabha and their electoral outcomes play a decisive role in national government formation. https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/blogs/toi-editorials/heartland-...


The heavy poverty burden, despite tremendous political heft and massive welfare funding, indicts heartland netas. Poor states cannot afford their enduring obsession with identity politics, but a shift in discourse towards economic development looks unlikely. Meanwhile, farm laws’ reversal makes poverty eradication in villages harder. Accounting for nearly 5 crore of India’s 12.5 crore unviable agricultural land holdings under 2 hectares, the failure of these four states to call out the subsidised big farmers and lead the clarion call for agri-reforms was another missed opportunity for their political economy.

The multidimensional poverty index constructed on health, education, and standard of living indicators like nutrition, years of schooling, and amenities like cooking fuel, electricity, pucca housing, sanitation, household assets etc, claims to better the erstwhile methodology of pegging a poverty baseline in monetary terms. Performance here depends to an extent on India’s sprawling welfare state, which has admittedly gained more mastery in delivering household amenities to the poor. But NFHS-5 findings of 60% women and young children facing malnutrition uncovers the limitations of welfarism, and conversely, the importance of economic growth to create enough jobs. Over to Nitish, Soren, Yogi, Shivraj, Akhilesh, Tejashwi and Kamal Nath.

Comment by Riaz Haq on December 2, 2021 at 4:15pm

India’s population will start to shrink sooner than expected
For the first time, Indian fertility has fallen below replacement level


https://www.economist.com/asia/2021/12/02/indias-population-will-st...

When something happens earlier than expected, Indians say it has been “preponed”. On November 24th India’s health ministry revealed that a resolution to one of its oldest and greatest preoccupations will indeed be preponed. Some years ahead of un predictions, and its own government targets, India’s total fertility rate—the average number of children that an Indian woman can expect to bear in her lifetime—has fallen below 2.1, which is to say below the “replacement” level at which births balance deaths. In fact it dropped to just 2.0 overall, and to 1.6 in India’s cities, says the National Family Health Survey (nfhs-5), a country-wide health check. That is a 10% drop from the previous survey, just five years ago.

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Slowing growth will reduce long-term pressure on some resources that are relatively scarce in India, such as land and water. The news may have other benefits, too. Politicians have often used fear of population growth to rally votes, typically by accusing “a particular community”—a circumlocution referring to India’s 15% Muslim minority—of having too many babies. Narendra Modi, the prime minister, has warned of a looming population explosion. Members of his Bharatiya Janata Party (bjp) have even called for limits to family size. In July legislators in bjp-controlled Uttar Pradesh proposed a law that would deny government services to families with more than two children.

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The Indian government’s new numbers may curtail these execrable suggestions. Fertility among Indian Muslims is generally higher than among Hindus. This is in part because so many are poor. But the difference has steadily narrowed; between 2005 and 2015 the fertility rate among Indian Muslims dropped from 3.4 to 2.6. Data on religion have yet to be parsed from the latest survey, but the fertility rates it shows for India’s only two Muslim-majority territories, the Lakshadweep Islands and Jammu & Kashmir, are far below replacement level and among the lowest in India, at 1.4.

While a declining fertility rate is broadly a sign that India is richer and better educated than before, it will also bring worries. Economists have long heralded the “demographic dividend”, when productivity rises because a bigger slice of the population pyramid is of working age. This window will now be narrower, and India will have to contend sooner with a fast-growing proportion of elderly people to care for.

Stark discrepancies in fertility rates between states also carry dangers. In future more Indians from the crowded north will seek jobs in the richer and less fecund south. Politicians will also face the hot issue of how to allot parliamentary constituencies. Back in 1971 Mrs Gandhi froze the distribution of seats among states. The result is that whereas an mp from Kerala now represents some 1.8m constituents, one from Uttar Pradesh represents nearly 3m. When the freeze on redistricting lifts some time in the next decade, these disparities will spawn a big fight.

Comment by Riaz Haq on December 2, 2021 at 6:56pm

Manpower export: Pakistan hopes to send 2 million workers abroad in next two years
Pakistan sent over 1.1 million workers abroad during the last three years despite the COVID-19 pandemic, claims Fawad Chaudhry

https://www.thenews.com.pk/latest/913514-manpower-export-pakistan-t...

As per the stats, Saudi Arabia is the largest recipient of Pakistani workers as 56,9870 people reached the kingdom during the last three years for various jobs, followed by UAE with 27,1775 Pakistani expats.

During the three-year period, 61,423 Pakistanis were sent to Oman, 53,692 to Qatar, 2,464 to UK, 1,943 to China and 1,157 to the US.

In total, Pakistan sent 1,026,640 workers abroad in the last three years.

Pakistan beat India, Bangladesh in manpower export in 2020

According to the Ministry of Overseas Pakistanis, the country has beaten Bangladesh and India in manpower export and has emerged as the "manpower export leader" in the region by sending around 224,705 workers to different countries for various jobs in 2020.

In a statement in July, the ministry said Bangladesh sent 217,699 workers abroad and India 94,145 for employment purposes during the same period.

Comment by Riaz Haq on December 25, 2021 at 8:44am

#India Facing a #Population Implosion. Urban India's fertility rate is1.6, below replacement. India has "a baby factory in the north (#Bihar, #UP, #MP, #Rajasthan) and a jobs factory in the south (#TN, #Kerala, #Andhra, #Karnataka) " @dhume https://www.wsj.com/articles/india-may-face-a-population-implosion-... via @WSJOpinion

After it gained independence in 1947, India’s soaring population—made possible by advances in medicine and disease control—seemed to doom it to poverty and hunger. Droughts in the mid-1960s raised the specter of famine. In 1966 the U.S. shipped one-fourth of its wheat output to India to avert mass starvation. Paul Ehrlich’s 1968 best-seller, “The Population Bomb,” predicted that hundreds of millions would starve and that by 1977 India could fall apart “into a large number of starving, warring minor states.”

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As in many countries, urbanization, rising income and female literacy, and increased contraception have led to plummeting fertility. But the biggest reason for the decline, according to Mr. Eberstadt, is hard to measure: Indian women want fewer babies.

In 1960 the average Indian woman would bear six children during her lifetime. By 2005 this had fallen to three. Urban India now has a fertility rate of 1.6, comparable to the European Union. And unlike China, whose government enforced a draconian one-child policy, India has achieved this largely without coercion. A harsh sterilization drive by Prime Minister Indira Gandhi in the mid-1970s led to her crushing electoral defeat in 1977. No Indian government tried to force the matter again.


Though India may have dodged mass famine, its massive population still poses challenges. Optimists claim the country’s skew toward youth provides a demographic dividend: a large working-age cohort to support relatively few retirees.

But such sunny prognostications present only half the picture. Thanks to uneven development, in the coming decades India will house an unprecedented experiment: hundreds of millions of college graduates living among hundreds of millions of illiterates. “The education gap in India could generate an income distribution that will make Manhattan look like Sweden,” says Mr. Eberstadt.

Regional disparities complicate things further. The relatively well-educated coastal states of the south already have fertility rates well below replacement levels. Birthrates in the poor and populous Hindi heartland have fallen too, but not nearly as sharply. Three of them—Uttar Pradesh, Bihar and Jharkhand—remain above replacement levels.

“To oversimplify, you have a baby factory in the north and a jobs factory in the south,” says Mr. Eberstadt. “But there’s a mismatch in educational attainment between a rising cohort in the north and the needs of the economy emerging in the south.” Kerala, in the south, has a literacy rate of 96%. Bihar, in the north, is 71%.

Then there’s the most sensitive question: political representation. In the relative weight of its states, India’s Parliament has remained frozen since the 1971 census. The average parliamentarian from Uttar Pradesh represents three million people, while a counterpart from Tamil Nadu represents 1.8 million. A 2019 report by Carnegie Endowment scholars Milan Vaishnav and Jamie Hintson calculated that if Parliament were reapportioned according to the likely population in 2026, the five southern states would send 26 fewer representatives to the 545-seat Parliament. The four most populous Hindi heartland states would add 31 seats.

If India is lucky, it will defuse these problems as successfully as it dealt with food shortages a generation ago. But though the population bomb failed to explode, it doesn’t mean India is safe from other ticking time bombs.

Comment by Riaz Haq on December 29, 2021 at 7:50am

Overseas Pakistanis provided vital support for Pakistan’s economy in 2021 as they invested a significant amount of $2.9 billion in different assets through the Roshan Digital Account (RDA) over the past 14 months, which bolstered the foreign exchange reserves.

https://tribune.com.pk/story/2336078/rda-inflows-to-stay-robust

Besides, the RDA inflows aided in offsetting the negative impact of foreign divestment of around $3.5 billion from the rupee-denominated government debt securities like treasury bills and Pakistan Investment Bonds (PIBs) in the aftermath of the Covid-19 pandemic.

RDA inflows also contributed to stabilising the Pakistani rupee against the US dollar and other foreign currencies.

“Pakistani diaspora is projected to inject an additional $2 billion in the remaining seven months (December-June) of the ongoing fiscal year 2021-22,” remarked Arif Habib Limited (AHL) economist Sana Tawfik while talking to The Express Tribune.

RDA receipts are different from the remittances sent by the non-resident Pakistanis (NRPs) to their family members and friends back home.

The inflow of remittances remained larger than export earnings in 2021. Remittances are used to partially finance import payments and repay foreign debt.

Overseas Pakistanis sent record high remittances of $29.4 billion in fiscal year 2020-21. They are estimated to inflate further to an all-time high of $31.8 billion by the end of current fiscal year in June 2022, according to the research house.

Turning to the RDA, Tawfik said “we expect total inflows of over $3 billion in FY22.”

So far, overseas Pakistanis have invested a total of $2.9 billion since the launch of the scheme by the central bank in September 2020. Data breakdown suggests that they have invested $1.35 billion in the first five months (July-November) of the ongoing fiscal year.

The non-resident Pakistanis have poured a significant amount through the RDA into the Naya Pakistan Saving Certificates, which “offer lucrative returns on investment of 5-7% per annum in foreign currencies,” she said.

Pakistan has offered attractive returns on the certificates to the non-resident Pakistanis at a time when the rest of the world (especially the developed countries) is offering a nominal return of around 0.25%.

Read RDA to ‘tighten the noose’ around illegal housing units

Investments made under the RDA are unlikely to be pulled out aggressively as opposed to the foreign divestment from the rupee-denominated T-bills and PIBs after the Covid-19 outbreak.

Investors prematurely sold the government debt securities to keep cash in hand during the pandemic and their investment was also facing the risk of rupee depreciation at that time.

“The rupee is expected to recover partially against the greenback in the second half (January-June) of FY22 when the inflation reading and current account deficit are projected to improve,” she said.

The expected improvement in macroeconomic indicators along with acceleration of economic activities in the second half of FY22 are likely to encourage the overseas Pakistanis to enhance investment in a host of assets in their homeland.

They will also consider investing more after the resumption of International Monetary Fund’s (IMF) loan programme worth $6 billion.

The IMF is scheduled to take up for approval the next loan tranche of $1 billion for Pakistan on January 12, 2022. It will be followed by a Sukuk (Islamic bond) offer in the international market and other inflows from the multilateral lenders like the World Bank and Asian Development Bank (ADB).

“RDA inflows will encourage overseas Pakistanis to pour a higher amount of investment in the coming months,” she said. “Salient features of the RDA such as permission to seamlessly divest at any point in time will push them to keep investing in Pakistan.”

Comment by Riaz Haq on January 6, 2022 at 4:47pm

India will likely get old before it gets rich
By Mihir Sharma

https://www.livemint.com/economy/india-seems-likely-to-grow-old-bef...

By the middle of this century, India will have 1.6 billion people. That’s when the country’s population will finally start to decline, ending up at perhaps a billion by 2100. While that is still around 250 million more people than China will have then, every time India’s population is projected, its peak seems to come earlier and crest lower. While India will be a young country for decades yet, it is ageing faster than expected. The latest round of India’s massive National Family Health Survey (NFHS) underscores the point. The average Indian woman is now likely to have only two children. That’s below the “replacement rate" of 2.1, at which the population would exactly replace itself over generations.
A few decades ago, this would have been considered miraculous in a country dismissed as a Malthusian nightmare. As modern health care became increasingly available after independence in 1947, population growth exploded—rising from 1.26% annually in the 1940s to 2% in the 1960s. Twenty years after independence, the demographer Sripati Chandrashekhar became India’s health minister and warned that “the greatest obstacle in the path of overall economic development is the alarming rate of population growth." The India in which I grew up was plastered with the inverted red triangle of the government’s family planning campaign.

As it turned out, increasing prosperity, decreases in infant mortality and—crucially—female education and empowerment achieved more than government propaganda ever could. In urban India, the fertility rate is now 1.6, according to the NFHS, equivalent to that of the US.

This is good news. But unalloyed good news is rare in India and this is no exception. The unexpected speed of the demographic transition has forced India to confront a new problem.

China-watchers have long debated whether that country will grow old before it gets rich. India now has to answer that same question, with far fewer resources at its disposal.

Draconian though China’s one-child policy was, those born under it received unprecedented attention from their families: Average education levels rose sharply, as did the quality of their nutrition. In India, by contrast, the NFHS shows that not only is child malnutrition high, it is not improving fast enough. In fact, in the five years after 2015-16, acute undernourishment actually worsened for children in most parts of India.

Meanwhile, India’s education system is clearly failing. Indian companies are already reporting a shortage of skilled manpower. That isn’t because schools aren’t turning out enough graduates. The Centre for Monitoring Indian Economy reports the unemployment rate for college graduates is 19.3%, almost three times higher than the national average. Universities just aren’t producing the kind of workers that companies feel they can employ. In some large-scale surveys, employers have said that less than half the college graduates entering the workforce have the cutting-edge skills they need or the ability to pick them up in the workplace.

Moreover, too few of these young people are trying to get into the workplace at all. Two-thirds of working-age Chinese are currently either employed or looking for a job, according to the International Labour Organization; at the beginning of the country’s high-growth spurt in the early 2000s, this labour force participation rate hit 80%. (The global average is close to 60%.) In India, by contrast, CMIE estimates that the country’s LPR stands at a mere 43% and that the pandemic has “lowered the LPR structurally" to 40%. One big reason: Just one in five Indian women work, which the World Bank has argued is linked to the social stigma of holding jobs outside the home.

Comment by Riaz Haq on April 30, 2022 at 6:52pm

The changing geography of remittance inflows

https://tribune.com.pk/story/2312688/the-changing-geography-of-remi...

The performance of these traditional sources of remittances mostly located in the Persian Gulf and North America ( Saudi Arabia, UAE, US, UK) pales in comparison with the growth in remittances from the younger communities sprouting in Europe and Asia Pacific. Remittances from EU countries (excluding the UK) increased by a spectacular 663.7% during the 2010-11 to 2020-21 period. Inflows from Germany and the Netherlands grew threefold, while those from Sweden grew fivefold. Growth was even higher for the three Latin countries, Spain (651%), France (957%) and Italy (1,128%). The best growth rate was achieved for Greece and Belgium, from where remittances grew 23 and 72 times, respectively. The growing diaspora in Australia and Japan too appears to send significantly more, with remittances from the two countries growing five and ninefold in the past 10 years, respectively.

In the preceding two decades, thousands of Pakistanis went to work in Europe, mainly to Southern European countries. Many of them were initially irregular workers who have since become legal residents, and can now use formal means of transferring money to their families back home. The Pakistani community in several countries in northern Europe and Australia has by contrast grown chiefly through emigration and settling down of university graduates.

As a result of these growth differentials, fast-growing remittances from Pakistani communities based in Europe and the Far East have gained importance overtime at the cost of slow-growing flows from the US. While transfers from the six Gulf states have maintained their lion’s share of Pakistan’s remittances of about 58%, those from the EU have grown threefold, from 3.1% in FY11 to 9.2% in FY21. Similarly, the relative share of remittances from Australia and Japan, which used to be negligible until recently, has collectively grown threefold in the past 10 years. Thanks to these changes in regional distribution, Europe has now become Pakistan’s second major sending region after the Persian Gulf, replacing North America, while the hitherto insignificant community in Asia Pacific is gradually coming into its own. Although Pakistan’s heavy reliance on the GCC states for its remittances has not yet waned, the increasing number of countries where Pakistani communities are getting settled and beginning to send significant amounts of money augurs well for the stability and durability of the country’s remittances.

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