From April to the end of June, the Diaspora sent 220 million BAM less compared to the same period last year, the Central Bank of BiH stated in the press release on Sunday. Total current transfers in the second quarter amounted to about 904 million BAM, of which about 554 million BAM referred to remittances from abroad, and the rest referred to other transfers.
The decline in remittances was also recorded in the first quarter of this year, when 23 million BAM less arrived from the diaspora.
According to the data of the Central Bank of Bosnia and Herzegovina (CBBH), total current transfers (personal and other transfers) from abroad in 2019 amounted to 4.29 billion BAM.
Of that amount, 2.95 billion BAM are personal transfers (remittances from abroad), and on other current transfers, which include pensions from abroad, 1.34 billion BAM, is explained for Fena news agency from the CBBH.
The amount of personal transfers increased last year by 9.66 percent compared to the end of 2018, when these transfers amounted to 2.69 billion BAM, according to Avaz news portal.
In terms of remittances, 2.37 billion BAM arrived in BiH from abroad in 2015, 2.43 billion BAM in 2016, and 2.64 billion BAM in 2017.
“From these data, it is obvious that there is a trend of continuous increase in the volume of remittances that Bosnian diaspora sends to BiH,” they said in the Central Bank of BiH, adding that they do not have data from which countries most personal remittances come from.
According to the latest published data from the Agency for Statistics of BiH, the GDP for 2019 is 35.026 billion BAM.“If we compare this with total transfers from abroad, we get that the share of total transfers from abroad is 12.24 percent of GDP. If we look only at remittances from abroad, their share is 8.42 percent of GDP,” according to the CBBH.
Analysts agree that remittances from the diaspora “improve the social picture” and contribute to preserving the stability of the domestic economy. They estimate that remittances from abroad from our diaspora mostly come from the countries of Western Europe, ie Germany, then Scandinavia, North America and to a lesser extent from Australia.
