Suchergebnisse

We analyse why Taiwanese families during the Ch'ing Dynasty still held communal assets vested in worship associations (chi ssu kung yeh) even after the division of family assets. Our analysis shows that worship associations benefitted the living as well as the dead. Although the high cost of managing common assets meant the associations were established infrequently, they arose often in a response to clan feuds and served as martial‐style corporations for the protection of family property before the twentieth century.

In Taiwan during the Japanese colonial period, sugarcane was typically purchased by Japanese-owned sugar mills at prices guaranteed long in advance of delivery. In some places, the future price was indexed to the price of rice in the following year. This study points out that indexing served to insure farmers' real incomes. But as an insurance against an aggregate risk, this arrangement threatened the mill's profits. We investigate why mills nevertheless offered the insurance.

This study investigates contractual relations between farmers and sugar mills in Japanese colonial Taiwan. Our investigation is based on a model of interlinked contracts that is adapted from Gangopadhyay and Sengupta (1998). The validity of our model's predictions is verified by analysing a dataset consisting of contracts between Taiwan's cane farmers and sugar mills. Our data suggest that the contractual relationship is consistent with a scenario in which the interest rates charged by sugar mills on cash loans to farmers are set in order to prevent the diversion of funds to other uses.

AbstractLand pawning is considered inefficient because it causes property rights to be unclearly delineated. Despite this, it once prevailed worldwide. We propose that this system flourished when state capacity was weak and the private sector spontaneously managed public affairs. Local collaboration made it difficult to sell land outright to an outsider who might be an unreliable collaborator. Land pawning granted the pawner's family and neighbours a 'probation' period to observe the pawnee's behaviour. If they found the pawnee irresponsible, they could still redeem the land. Data compiled from contracts in Qing Taiwan support our hypothesis.