Overseas remittances to Ho Chi Minh City is expected to total 5.2 billion USD this year. (Photo: internet) HCMCity (VNA) – Overseas remittances to Ho Chi Minh City is expectedto total 5.2 billion USD this year, up 4.5 percent year-on-year, said anofficial of the State Bank of Vietnam (SBV).
According to Nguyen Hoang Minh, Deputy Director of the SBV’s branch in HCMCity, the flows of remittances to HCM City have remained stable and increased monthlysince the beginning of this year, reaching 600 million USD in October and 650million USD in November.
In the first 11 months of this year, the figure stood at 4.55 billion USD, with60 percent of the money coming from the US and over 19 percent from Europe, hesaid.
Minh noted that most of the remittances (72 percent) have gone into productionand business activities, in stead of being kept in coffers, spent on dailylives or invested in real estate and property markets as they were in the past.
Remittances have helped stabilise Vietnam dong and ensure the US dollar supply whileenabling the central bank to shore up the foreign reserves and focus oneconomic growth support policies, he said, noting that Vietnam dong has emergedas one of the most stable currencies in Asia so far this year.
Huynh Trung Minh, a financial expert, said that remittance flows this year showsigns of slight decline due to impacts of the US Federal Reserve’s decision to raiseinterest rate in mid-2017 and local banks’ move to slash interest rate on USdollar deposits to zero percent.
In fact, remittances to Vietnam increased continuously since 2010 and hit a recordof 13.2 billion USD in 2015. However, the amount dropped by 33 percent in 2016,he said.-VNA
VNA
