26% of Jamaican households received remittances up to June 2024

 

Twenty-six per cent of local households say they were in receipt of remittances up to the end of the second quarter this year.

 

Following the latest Consumer Confidence Survey, Executive Chairman of Market Research Services Don Anderson, said the number of households receiving funds from overseas, has not returned to pre-pandemic levels. 

 

It was 29 per cent in 2021 and 26 per cent in 2022, during the height of COVID-19. Up to the end of the second quarter of 2023, it was 27 per cent of households that said they received remittances.

 

"The real factor of course is that the significant bulk of our remittances come from the developed markets, the United States, UK and Canada, in that order. And obviously, those countries have been affected by COVID, and that's the result of that falloff between 2020 and 2024 in the incidence of persons across the country that receive remittances. It hasn't picked up. It bumped up a little bit in 2023, back down to 26 per cent in 2024, up to date, year-to-date first quarter and second quarter," Mr. Anderson disclosed. 

 

In the Jamaica Chamber of Commerce commissioned survey, 30 per cent of the respondents who were getting money from overseas, were getting more money than three years ago.

 

Thirty-five per cent said they were getting less funds than they did three years ago.

 

Thirty-one per cent received the same amount of money, while five per cent said they have not been receiving money from overseas for that long.

 

The Consumer Confidence Survey started tracking remittances in 2011.