American economic policy toward the Philippines / Shirley Jenkins. ; with an introduction by Clause A. Buss.

Economic and commercial factors have always exerted a major influence on the course of American relations with the Philippines, but their dominant role has been particularly evident since the Philippines became politically independent. For one thing, it soon became clear that despite its political autonomy the new Republic was still tied by many commercial and financial apron strings to the United States, whether on the government level (as in case of war damage payments and ECA and MSA aid programs) or on the level of private business (as in the case of investments by American firms and the regulations controlling imports and foreign exchange in the Philippines in recent years). But there is no doubt that the legal fact of political independence, together with the political fact of an increasingly self-conscious Filipino nationalism, has made the problem of Philippine-American economic relations more complex and a greater potential source of misunderstanding than in former years. --From the foreword