Jesus P. Estanislao, Ph. D. and Alyssamae A. Nuñez, M.S.I.E.
Abstract
Philippine colonial history has been documented as our people’s struggle for shaping our national identity, a process that involved our cultural assimilation of foreign influences and long-term changes in our economy, polity, and society. This paper takes an alternative approach to looking at Philippine colonial history using the governance prism in viewing those long-term changes, emphasizing the transformative changes that the colonial experiences under both Spain and America may have wrought on our country. It draws from earlier works presented by historians on possible governance agenda that the Spanish and American colonial administrators pursued and examines the national income indicators (for the Spanish colonial period) and the formal GDP estimates (for the US colonial period) which were made consistent with each other
so as to present a very long-term perspective of economic growth. With such a perspective, the paper subscribes to Kuznets’s hypothesis that economic growth leads to structural changes. It then adds that those structural changes, in particular, the transformative changes brought out by the use of the governance prism, do not go only one way. The paper presents a more open alternative, i.e., that many of those transformative changes have either facilitated or hindered the wider and much longer-term development. This may well be of special relevance as the Philippines draws governance lessons from its historical past and may apply to building our long-term future, which helps secure a more progressive, inclusive, and sustainable development for our people.