Paper short abstract:

Overseas Filipinos send family members cash and gifts that support the national economy. To meet subsistence needs, I argue Philippine recipients, entrepreneurs and officials activate the transnational flow of gifts especially trading them in informal/formal, gift/commodity and extralegal spheres.

Paper long abstract:

Filipinos working abroad (Overseas Filipino Workers or OFWs) regularly send cash remittances and in-kind gifts (cosmetics, vitamins, used clothing) to Philippine family members. OFW's gifts are not subject to customs duties because, like cash, they contribute to the Philippine economy. However, because the state's political-economic infrastructure fails to meet citizens' subsistence needs, both Philippine gift recipients and entrepreneurs working in Baguio, for example, operationalize this transnational flow by diverting the gifted products into public market trade - transactions that straddle informal/formal, gift/commodity and sometimes extralegal practice.

This paper argues that both Baguio entrepreneurs and resident gift recipients activate interdependent commodity (formal) and gifting (informal) conversations to innovatively enmesh sectors of societies across global locations. Baguio residents, for example, who do not want the OFW informally-gifted goods they receive, sell or exchange these products, in commodity transactions, at applicable public market stores. Entrepreneurs, in turn, foster customer relations by gifting capital income from these sales and goods to community welfare initiatives. Baguio marketers thus emerge as international entrepreneurs while remaining seated in their local stores. Simultaneously, depending upon the government's agenda, officials variably permit the tax-free import and sale of gifted goods, tax or confiscate these imports, or raise these goods' tax-exempt status (Aquino 2015). Given that the Philippine economy continues to be propped up by OFW remittances and gifted goods, I argue that both Baguio residents and entrepreneurs will use informality as an urban organizing logic when it is to their respective advantages (Roy 2005; Smart & Zerilli 2014).