Please use this identifier to cite or link to this item: https://hdl.handle.net/10419/101284 
Authors: 
Year of Publication: 
2012
Series/Report no.: 
ADBI Working Paper No. 397
Publisher: 
Asian Development Bank Institute (ADBI), Tokyo
Abstract: 
This essay provides a game-theoretic, endogenous view of institutions, and then applies the idea to identify the sources of institutional trajectories of economic development in China, Japan, and Korea. It stylizes the Malthusian-phase of East Asian economies as peasant-based economies in which small families allocated their working time between farming on small plots - leased or owned - and handcrafting for personal consumption and markets. It then compares institutional arrangements across these economies that sustained otherwise similar economies. It characterizes the varied nature of the political states of Qing China, Tokugawa Japan, and Yi Korea by focusing on the way in which agricultural taxes were enforced. It also identifies different patterns of social norms of trust that were institutional complements to, or substitutes for, political states. Finally, it traces the path-dependent transformations of these state-norm combinations along subsequent transitions to post-Malthusian phases of economic growth in the respective economies.
Subjects: 
china
japan
institutional complementarity
institutional change
capitalism
varieties of norms
political economy
JEL: 
O43
O53
P51
Document Type: 
Working Paper

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