MANILA, Sept 16, 2008 (AFP) - Large-scale labour migration from the Philippines is expected to gather pace despite a global credit crunch that has slowed growth in many nations hosting Filipino workers, officials and experts said Tuesday.

'There have been similar occurrences (of the crisis) before but the number of workers who left for overseas employment did not dip at all,' said Carmelita Dimzon, deputy chief of the labour department's Philippine Overseas Employment Administration.

Even as the crisis bit last year, 'we managed to deploy over a million overseas workers,' she told a news conference.

Some 8.5 million Filipinos, or nearly a 10th of the population, live or temporarily work abroad, said Josef Yap, head of the semi-official think-tank Philippine Institute for Development Studies.

The central bank said they remitted 14.4 billion dollars back to their families in the Philippines last year, an amount equivalent to a 10th of the country's gross domestic product, Yap told the same news conference.

Dimzon said crisis or not, the ageing populations of the United States and Europe will lead to increasing demand for Filipino health workers.

She said without giving exact figures there had been notable 'growth in the hiring of oil refinery engineers and technicians, particularly in Canada' as crude prices surged to record levels earlier this year.

In the Middle East, Kuwait has been hiring Filipino workers for an oil refinery project, she said.

There is also a huge demand for Filipino oil workers in Nigeria, but 'we have a ban now' on worker deployments there, Dimzon said, citing previous kidnappings of Filipinos and other foreign oil workers by separatists.

Ateneo de Manila University economist Fernando Aldaba said that with the Philippine economic growth rate forecast to slow this year and next from more than 7.0 percent in 2007, the jobless rate was bound to rise 'so more people will be applying for work abroad.'

While retrenchments from stressed industries in the developed world would mean some Filipino workers 'will be coming home,' Aldaba said, this will not be the case in all sectors.