Size and dynastic decline: The principal-agent problem in late imperial China, 1700–1850

Asia’s little divergence: state capacity in China and Japan before 1850

“…If these factors had a strong and increasingly differential influence on state capacity in China and Japan, the empirical importance of our theoretical findings may be weakened. 56 Importantly, the frequency and scale of violent peasant uprisings in China escalated from the 1770s onward due to weakening social control (Naquin and Rawski 1987;Sng 2014). The first large-scale commoner uprising in Qing China, the Lin Shuangwen Uprising of 1786, preceded the Opium War (1839-42) by half a century and two of the subsequent major uprisings also took place before the Western intrusion (i.e., the White Lotus Rebellion of 1796 and the Eight Trigrams Uprising of 1813).…”

“…Sng (2014) has shown that the Qing state collected more taxes in regions closer to the capital where the imperial court could monitor the tax officials better. Although fiscal information on the smaller Japanese domains is fragmented, existing evidence suggests that tax rates were higher outside the shogunate (Nakabayashi 2012).…”

“…This paper builds directly upon Sng (2014), who studies the impact of geographical size on the principal-agent problem in late imperial China. Our work significantly extends his model by incorporating public goods provision and offers new comparative empirical evidence by bringing Japan into the picture.…”

“…8 In Levi's words (1988, p. 14), "Absolute monarchs are rulers who possess a virtual monopoly over coercive capacity but not necessarily a perfect monitoring capacity." See Kiser and Tong (1992), Ma (2011), andSng (2014) for more discussions on agency problems in imperial China.…”

“…8 Aggregate tax revenue (Real). Sources: Ohno (1996) and Sng (2014) public goods that serve (one or several) local communities and those that serve a wide region (or province). Historical studies indicate that in early modern China and Japan, much of the community-level local public goods, such as local roads and irrigation, were privately provided under the initiatives of local elites.…”