Economic cooperation in 19th-century Taiwan: Religion and informal enforcement

In the pre-20th-century Taiwanese economy, religious corporations played a primary role in providing informal enforcement services. This paper present s evidence that many of these religious corporations were used to help defi ne and enforce water rights in irrigated areas. Religious corporations were important to commerce and investment in Chinese society, but agency proble ms limited their size and they thus tended to fragment society into rival g roups making the broad transparent markets necessary for economic developme nt difficult to establish.