It is well known that Philippine trade statistics during the American period are available in Report of Bureau of Customs, 1907-1940, while the statistics of the earlier period of the 20th century are available in "Historical Review: 1904," The Commercial Philippines in 1906, "Imports, Exports: 1901 to 1908" and Statistical Bulletin: 1920.
On the other hand, the location of the materials on Philippine trade statistic of the late 19th century has not been extensively examined. It is Benito F. Legarda, Jr. who examined the Philippine foreign trade pattern of the late 19th century based on the original reports published in the contemporary period[Legarda: 1955]. However, he did not mention the location of these materials in his dissertation.
Thus, as a part of the larger project on the "Compilation of Asian Historical Statistics" of the Institute of Economic Research, Hitotsubashi University, Tokyo, the author conducted research on the location of the materials on Philippine foreign trade reports of the late 19th century in the Philippines and the United States in 1995-1996. In Spain, the research was conducted with the help of Miguel Luque Talavan of Universidad Complutense de Madrid in 1997.
The following are the original titles of the Philippine foreign trade reports which were published in Manila in the late 19th century.
(1) Balanza general del comercio de las Islas Filipinas, 1851-1855.
(2) Cuadro general del comercio exterior de Filipinas con la metropoli, potencias extrageras de Europa, America, Africa, Asia y colonias de la Oceania, 1856.
(3) Balanza mercantil de las Islas Filipinas, 1857-1865.
(4) Estadistica mercantil del comercio exterior de las Islas Filipinas, 1866-1867,1873-1880.
(5) Estadistica general del comercio exterior de las Islas Filipinas, 1881-1894.
As a result of the research, the author found that all the volumes of the trade reports from 1851 to 1894, except five years from 1868 to 1872 (1), are available either in US Library of Congress and US National Archives in Washington, DC, the Philippine National Archives in Manila, the Harvard University Lamont Library or Biblioteca Nacional in Madrid. The Hitotsubashi project has obtained microfilmed copies of these materials from three institutions, the US Library of Congress, Philippine National Archives and Biblioteca Nacional (Table 1).
However, for writing up this paper, the author has only used the microfilms of Balanza general del comercio de las Islas Filipinas, 1854-1855, Balanza mercantil de las Islas Filipinas, 1858-1860, 1863-1864 and Estadistica mercantil del comercio exterior de las Isals Filipinas, 1867, 1873-1874, 1876-1880 which were obtained from the Philippine National Archives in 1995. Reference is also made to Estadistica general del comercio exterior de las Islas Filipinas, 1894 which the author read in the Ateneo de Manila University Library in 1997. Microfilms for other years have recently been received and are being kept for further research.
(1) The location of the materials for these five years is unknown. Though Tavera listed the titles of the volumes for five years which were published in Manila, he did not specify their number of pages and publishers unlike the publications of other years [Tavera: 1903, 41].