The 10 Million Filipinos Working Outside the Country Are Managing a Global Energy Crisis From a Specific Position
Bohiney Magazine | The London Prat
OFW Remittances in the Age of the Hormuz Crisis: Sending Money Home From a World That Costs More
MANILA — Approximately 10 million Filipinos work overseas — in Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Qatar, Hong Kong, Singapore, Japan, the United States, Europe, and practically every other major economy — and send home approximately $36 billion annually in remittances that constitute one of the Philippine economy’s most critical revenue sources and that directly support approximately 27 percent of Filipino households. The Strait of Hormuz conflict has complicated this picture in specific ways that the aggregate remittance data does not fully capture.
The approximately 2 million OFWs working in the Gulf region — Saudi Arabia, UAE, Qatar, Kuwait, Bahrain — are working in economies whose own fiscal positions have been affected by the conflict, in some cases positively (higher oil revenues for producing states) and in others negatively (higher energy costs, supply chain disruptions, economic uncertainty). The OFWs in these economies are navigating their own cost of living pressures from the global energy shock while sending money home to families facing the same pressures in the Philippines. The remittance in pesos is affected by exchange rate movements that the energy crisis has influenced. The mathematics of supporting a family in Manila from a salary in Riyadh in April 2026 is more difficult than it was in January 2025.
The Structural Dependence
The Philippines’ dependence on OFW remittances as a macroeconomic stabilizer is both real and a vulnerability: the economy has adjusted to a structural outflow of working-age labor whose remittances support domestic consumption, in a way that reduces the domestic pressure to develop the labor market and institutional conditions that would retain skilled workers. Managing structural economic dependency requires eventually addressing the conditions that produce it; the global fuel crisis has added external pressure to an internal structural question that the Philippines has been deferring for decades. The remittances will continue. The structural question will continue being deferred. Both patterns are durable.