Fiji is increasingly becoming a remittance economy with thousands of citizens heading to work overseas, according to the UN World Food Programme (WFP) in its Price Monitoring mid-year review report on Fiji.
The WFP report said the Government had announced close to 22,000 people, excluding residents leaving on student visas, have left the country to date in 2023.
“In 2022, the total remittances increased by 25 per cent compared to 2021 and reached $1.04 billion, accounting for 9.4 per cent of the nominal GDP,” said the WFP report.
“This trend continued in the first months of 2023, with an increase by 36 per cent in March 2023 compared to March 2022. From January to March 2023, $271.8 million was transferred to Fiji in remittances.
“With the stabilisation of the political situation in the country, emigration slowed down throughout the ’90s, closing the last century with a net migration rate of -7.3.”
The report said the launch of seasonal labour mobility schemes in Australia and New Zealand in the early 2000s initiated a new emigration wave from Fiji, with the net migration rate deteriorating progressively until 2019 (-12.8), when the COVID-19 pandemic put on hold any movement in and out of the country.
It said that despite the irregular migration pattern over the past 50 years, the relative weight of personal remittances as a percentage of the total GDP had been increasing for the past decade, and the trend drastically accelerated during the COVID-19 pandemic.
“This means that despite the number of migrants plummeting due to travel restrictions, family members that migrated in previous years increased the amount of money transferred back to Fiji.
“Currently, remittances supplement household incomes as well as they are a major and reliable source of foreign exchange.”
