The Philippines: The Political Economy of Growth and Impoverishment in the Philippines

This book analyzes the Philippine economy from the 1960s to the 1980s. During this period, the benefits of economic growth conspicuously failed to trickle down. Despite rising per capita income, broad sectors of the Filipino population experienced deepening poverty. Professor Boyce traces this outcome to the country’s economic and political structure and focuses on three elements of the government’s development strategy: the green revolution in rice agriculture, the primacy accorded to export agriculture and forestry, and massive external borrowing. James Boyce is the author of Agrarian Impasse in Bengal and co-author of A Quiet Violence: View from a Bangladesh Village.