American economic policy in the Philippines, 1902-1940: Exploring a dark age in colonial statistics

This paper presents a detailed estimate of GDP for the Philippines from 1902 to 1940, and analyses factors accounting for changes in growth rates during that era. A crash program in agricultural modernization produced a doubling of rice and corn yields between 1910 and the late 1920s. As a result, the Philippine GDP growth rate in the first two decades outstripped all other nations in East and Southeast Asia. However fiscal constraints appeared by the late 1920s, causing this and other infrastructure projects to be curtailed. An overvalued peso emerged after 1930 and this, alongside a slowdown in productivity caused the rate of Philippine GDP growth to fall behind that of neighboring countries including Japan, Korea and Taiwan. These developments in the later years of the colonial period seriously compromised the transition to economic independence in 1946.