Manpower export drops by 50 per cent

When Anita Gimmi was unable to find work in her native Nepal last year, she
borrowed 1,300 dollars and travelled to Qatar to take up a two- year
contract with a cleaning company there. Less than a year later, the
26-year-old has been forced to return home still heavily in debt after
becoming one of thousands of foreign workers to be laid off as the economic
downturn hits Southeast Asia and the Middle East. Many Asian countries
including Nepal, Bangladesh, the Philippines and Pakistan have registered
increases in foreign remittances this year. In Bangladesh, where in the
past year alone remittances contributed 11 per cent to GDP, government
figures show a huge drop in the number of people going abroad to seek work.
Almost 251,000 people left the country between January and June — a 50
per cent drop on the same period last year, according to the Bureau of
Manpower and Employment Training. BMET director general Masud Ahmed said
the slowing of economies in the Gulf region, where many Bangladeshis are
employed, was a key reason for the downturn. 'Unless their economies
pick up, we don't see any major boost in the country's manpower export,'
Ahmed told AFP. Pakistan's economy relies heavily on its roughly four
million expatriates — around two million of them in the Gulf — and
registered a record 7.81 billion dollars in remittances for the 2008/9
financial year. But economist AB Shahid said this was 'due mainly to the
transfer of settlement dues by Pakistani expatriates whose services have
been terminated in recession-suffering Gulf countries. ' Vietnamese
welder Tran Trung Hieu left for Slovakia last November on a three-year
contract, but was expelled in May after his company terminated the contract
citing the economic downturn.