Labor Coercion and State Capacity: Evidence from Colonial Indonesia
2021/01/25
研討會日期 : 2021-01-25
時間 : 16:00
主講人 : Mr. Mark Hup
主持人 : Professor Terry Cheung
地點 : Conference Room B110
演講者簡介 : Mr. Hup will receive his Ph.D. in Economics from University of California, Irvine in 2021. His research field are Economic History, Political Economy, Public Economics, and Development Economics. He is applying for a position of the Institute of Economics, Academia Sinica now.
演講摘要 : Fiscal modernization is key for long-run economic development. This is the first study to estimate the effect of state capacity expansion on labor coercion as taxation, a practice known as corvée labor. To do so, I construct a new database covering eighteen Indonesian provinces over thirty-two years (1874-1905). I find that local state expansion increased corvée labor use. Increasing state capacity thus need not necessarily induce fiscal modernization. However, national-level policy centralized state finances by replacing corvée with a poll tax. Local officials thus only slowed the movement away from corvée. Opposing interests of different state actors are therefore key in understanding this facet of fiscal modernization.
