DHAKA, July 9 (Xinhua) -- Over 300,000 Bangladeshis found overseas jobs in the first half of 2019, a decline of more than 15 percent over the same period last year, an official said here Tuesday.
An official of the country's Bureau of Manpower Employment and Training (BMET) said "332,754 people found jobs abroad in January-June this year, down from 392,002 during the same period in 2018."
He said some 45,200 people found overseas jobs in June this year, down 25.64 percent compared with that in the previous month.
Of the total overseas employment in the first six months of 2019, the BMET official, who requested to be unnamed, told Xinhua that more than two-thirds of Bangladeshi workers found jobs in Saudi Arabia, Oman, Qatar and Singapore.
The BMET data revealed that Saudi Arabia recruited 188,747 workers in last six months, followed by Oman 37,352, Qatar 36,070 and Singapore 23,399.
According to the official, Bangladesh suffered blow as employment opportunities for the country's millions of foreign job aspirants in the United Arab Emirates and Malaysia, two big traditional destinations for Bangladeshis, came to a near halt in the first half of this year.
Despite the fall in overseas employment, officials said, remittance inflows from 10 million Bangladeshis living and working in about 100 foreign countries and regions, set a new record in the 2018-19 fiscal year (July 2018-June 2019).
Quoting provisional data, a Bangladesh Bank official had earlier said that remittances from the Bangladeshi wage earners abroad during the 2018-19 fiscal year stood at 16.40 billion U.S. dollars, 9.47 percent higher than the same period a year ago.
