紀要論文

Law and Commerce in Traditional China : An Institutional Perspective on the "Great Divergence"

eng

00229741

https://doi.org/10.15002/00001948

法政大学経済学部学会

73

4

69

96

2006-03-03

Version of Record

In the West, legal tradition was generally characterized by the use of external and relatively fixed rules or precedents with independent third party enforcement. In China, the legal structure was part of the government bureaucracy that often relied on the use of general and flexible legal and ethical principles to mediate civil and commercial disputes. This paper provides a review on the debate on China's traditional legal system in a comparative perspective. It shows that lineage and native-place based Chinese merchant groups resorted to a reputation mechanism and informal and internal rules to enforce contracts and secure property rights. As the Western type of rule-based system exhibits scale economies with rising efficiency at higher volumes of exchange, particularly impersonal exchange, I argue that divergent legal traditions shed crucial insights to the differential patterns of long-term economic growth and the "great divergence" between China and the West in the modern era.

Article

AN00071028