Remittances down sharply from Ecuadorians abroad

Andes.info.ec reported that… Saturday, in the name of 600,000 Ecuadorian migrants living in Spain (the most prominent South American group of people in the Iberian country), the Ecuadorian president, Rafael Correa, thanked the Spanish government for its decision to refrain from executing evictions for two years to those who earn less than 19,000 euros a year.

The effect of the Iberian country’s systemic crisis on migrants’ remittances is also indicated through workforce performance with an unemployment rate of 25% in September, affecting about 4.7 million people.

In this context, the allocation of remittances by Ecuadorian migrants, in the second trimester, went from $322 million in 2007 to $194 million between April and June of 2012, a loss of $122 million in the trimester, revealing consistent losses in the last five years.

This tendency is even more evident from a yearly perspective. In 2007 migrants from Spain sent $1,346 million to their families in Ecuador. In 2011, however, this figure barely reached $1,008 million.

Comparatively, an income of $194 million from one trimester of remittances is just as important as the Ecuadorian exports of nine months of coffee, valued at $190 million, a product in fifth place among non-petroleum traditional exports.

In the first nine months of the year, Ecuador and Spain have performed $701 million worth of business exchanges, among which $343 million are exports and $358 million are imports. This leaves an unfavorable remaining balance for Ecuador, as of September, of $15 million. Read Article