MANILA (OFW Journalism Consortium) – Dirty money passing through or flowing into the country as monitored by the Philippine anti-money laundering unit hasn’t involved overseas Filipino workers, yet, its executive director said.

Of the 18,269 suspicious transactions the Anti-Money Laundering Council flagged for the past six years ending 2007, none of these are linked to formal and informal flows of earnings by OFWs, data from AMLC revealed.

MANILA (OFW Journalism Consortium) – A recent report by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development showed that while the Philippines has a low brain drain rate, Filipinos who reached college remain attracted in working or settling over long periods in OECD’s 29 member-countries.

The report bared that some 46.7 percent of the nearly two million Filipinos in OECD member-countries are tertiary educated while 35.7 percent have secondary education.

The country’s brain drain rate (or the emigration rate of people holding a tertiary degree) is 3.9 percent in total, said the report titled A Profile of Immigrant Populations in the 21st Century.

MANILA (OFW Journalism Consortium) — A World Bank senior economist judged the Philippines as shackled by rent-seekers, dampening appetite for local investment and pushing out Filipinos to seek “happiness” in other countries.

“In the traditional sectors, the rent-seekers are powerful and well established,” World Bank East Asia and Pacific Region senior economist Alessandro Magnoli Bocchi said.

“Well-established in sectors that are strategic because of multiple backward and forward linkages, the conglomerates –by producing expensive inputs– skim rents from the economy and shrink the margins of the potentially most dynamic agents: the small and medium domestic private producers,” Bocchi added.

MAKATI CITY (OFW Journalism Consortium) – Extreme reliance on money from Filipinos overseas hasn’t helped the country get out of the poverty rut and may even hobble the poor’s income capability, says an economist.

Using government’s triennial Family Income and Expenditures Survey, University of the Philippines economist Ernesto Pernia said in a research that remittances from overseas Filipino workers may be contributing to the persistence of high inequality in the country.