Why Bangladesh punches below its weight in remittance

Bangladesh receives around $24-27 billion in remittances each year, placing the country firmly in the global top 10, ahead of Nigeria, Vietnam and Indonesia. It is the headline figure that every government in Dhaka has, with reason, taken credit for over the past two decades. It is also, on closer inspection, a figure that quietly indicts us.

The comparator that makes the case sharpest is the Philippines. The Philippines receives roughly $36-38 billion in remittances a year, ranking fourth globally. Its diaspora abroad is around 10 million people. The Bangladeshi diaspora, by most working estimates, is closer to 13 million.

We have a third more people working overseas than the Philippines, yet they remit close to 40 percent more than we do. The average Filipino migrant remits home nearly twice what the average Bangladeshi migrant does.

Several factors explain the per-migrant gap, and not all of them are within our policy reach. One factor, though, sits squarely within our reach: reducing the cost of leaving Bangladesh, which is among the highest in the region.

For an unskilled or semi-skilled worker bound for the GCC, the all-in cost frequently runs to several thousand dollars -- and most of this is borrowed, often at usurious rates, against the security of land, livestock and anything else the household can put up.

The worker spends the first six to 12 months of his contract servicing that debt rather than remitting home -- this is the hidden tax. Multiply this out across roughly one million Bangladeshis departing for work each year and the amount runs into the low single-digit billions of dollars. And it accrues to no one useful.

There is a deeper structural feature here: the recruitment tax falls hardest on those least able to bear it.  We are, on the current trajectory, paying for it twice: once at the worker level and once at the national level, in remittance flows we never see.

The international context has shifted sharply on this question. In April 2026, the French Presidency of the G7 convened the 2nd Employment Working Group of the G7 Social in Paris, with one of the working group’s flagship deliverables a G7 operational and replicable toolkit on the responsible recruitment of migrant workers.

The toolkit will, when published, codify a working definition of responsible recruitment that destination governments and ESG-screened employers will increasingly be expected to enforce through their supply chains.

Sending countries that can demonstrate compliant corridors at scale, with case studies to prove it, will be the preferred origin partners for the better international employers. Those who cannot will be relegated to the less appealing job descriptions and lower salaries -- a discount applied purely on the basis of nationality.

Bangladesh has a comparative advantage on this front that is rarely articulated. Between 2017 and 2021, in the buildup to the FIFA World Cup, at least one Bangladeshi recruitment operator deployed a substantial cohort of unskilled and semi-skilled men to Qatar in construction and hospitality, under arrangements where every recruitment-related cost was borne by the principal employer at destination and not by the worker.

The corridor was witnessed and documented by the ILO and the IOM. It stands today as one of the most thoroughly documented zero-cost recruitment cohorts run from any South Asian sending country in the past decade.

The feasibility question -- can a zero-cost corridor be run from Bangladesh at scale -- has been answered, and the answer is yes. The remaining question is whether destination employers insist on it as the standard or continue to accept the worker-paid model as a tolerable default.

Here, the private sector is structurally better placed to lead on than the government. Government policy can help, and the public infrastructure for managing this trade urgently needs the reform it has been promised for many years. But the corridor work, the operational architecture, the day-to-day relationships with destination employers -- these are private-sector activities, conducted in private-sector time, with private-sector accountability.

The Qatar cohort was built without formal government facilitation, and it would not have happened on the timeline it did have it required one. This model can be replicated and hopefully start to become the norm. The policy environment that helps the willing and disciplines the unwilling is the one that matters.

The economics, finally, are catching up with the ethics. The international employers that increasingly drive this market will, within the present decade, source from corridors where worker cost has been demonstrably eliminated. Bangladesh can either be one of those corridors at scale or watch the volume migrate, slowly and unannounced, to other shores. The case is no longer moral alone, although it remains so.

Bangladesh enters the next decade with one of the largest working-age cohorts in its history. We will need every lever at our disposal to ensure this generation has the gainful employment and the chance to grow that it deserves. The demographic dividend we have been blessed with deserves all our continued effort.

The author served as an invited expert panellist on Deliverable 6 (responsible recruitment of migrant workers) at the 2nd Employment Working Group of the G7 Social, French Presidency, Paris, 16-17 April 2026