Remittances to Pakistan Remained Flat in 2017: World Bank

Pakistan received $20 billion in remittances in 2017 against $19.8 billion in 2016, says World Bank (WB) in its latest report.

According to the WB’s latest report, “Migration and Remittances”, Pakistan received $20 billion in remittances in 2017, India got $69 billion, China received $64 billion and Bangladesh managed $13 billion.

In Pakistan, after a slow growth in 2016 (2.4 percent), remittances remained nearly flat in 2017 largely due to significant declines in inflows from Saudi Arabia (the largest remittance source) toward the end of the year, states the report.


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This could be due to the labor market nationalization policies in Saudi Arabia. This trend continued into early 2018, but remittance flows from the United Arab Emirates, the United Kingdom, and the United States accelerated.

Deployments of Pakistani workers to Saudi Arabia in the first six months of 2017 were just 17 percent of the total workers who went to the kingdom in 2016 (77,600 in January–June 2017 vs. 462,598 in 2016). The Kingdom recently placed restrictions on the recruitment of 12 categories of foreign workers.

In South Asia, Pakistan is a major transit country for Afghans. Both Afghan and Pakistani transit migrants tend to stop in Turkey on their way to Europe, maintained the WB report.



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