Data harvesting from Malaysia’s remittance business is vital in order to push the segment even further, according to Bank Negara deputy governor Jessica Chew Cheng Lian.
Chew in her keynote address at the Global Forum on Remittances, Investment and Development 2018 (GFRID18) said dynamic growth in remittances over the past decade has been in Asia, which receives 55 per cent of all flows, with remittances equal over 20 per cent of gross domestic product (GDP).
“It is encouraging that effort are being taken to ensure the availability of official global data sources on remittance flows, yet challenges remain in ensuring that the data is both complete and comparable,” she said.
“These challenges are compounded by an increasing need for data at a more granular and disaggregated level. For example, initiatives by the United Nations Capital Development Fund to survey remittance recipients in the Mekong region helped develop a better understanding of relationships between gender and financial inclusion and yet, such data is not available in many other countries.”
She stressed that there are huge opportunities to collect and share remittance and migration data at the Asean level given the increasing size of intra-regional migration.
“Without good data, we cannot hope to move very far or with much confidence in efforts to increase the development impact of remittances.”
By : Shafik Ali (MaxMoney)
