Financial Management and Fishery & Salt Policy in Late Chosŏn : Focusing on the Regulations of the Equalized Tax Law for Maritime Taxes
Journal Title: International Journal of Korean History - Year 2011, Vol 16, Issue 2
Abstract
The Regulations of the Equal-Service Law of 1750 for maritime taxes, finalized in the revision of the fishery-salt tax, did not make an active move for the financial expansion of state revenue. Because of the state’s emphasis on the use of the fishery-salt tax for a compensation to the reduction of ‘military service tax for men of good status,’ the taxation was confined strictly to means of production, not any surplus value gathered from the process of commodity transaction. This noncommercial orientation of the taxation under the Regulations caused the serious lack of fact-finding investigation and exact calculation for the completion of the taxation. At the same time, while laying blame on the various illegal activities, including concealment and negligence, of the local offices and their associates for the gradual reduction of the tax revenue, the state had little consideration on how to guarantee a stable condition for the taxpayers to continue the business. There was no state-sponsored program to sustain the conservation of the fishery-salt business that usually faced a precarious market in production and price. The passive approach as above made the fishery-salt tax vulnerable to the hands of the royal estates, central bureaus, and local administration in an endeavor to secure their own finances rather than state revenue. Under these circumstances, the provincial quota system was introduced as a supplementary financial resource in state revenue. Eventually, the provincial quota system came to facilitate the localization or decentralization of the fishery-salt tax due to the enormous amount of expenditure in management. The enactment of the Regulations reflected the basic limit of the Chos?n economy in the 18th and 19th centuries. The vital expansion of commodity transaction during the periods definitely needed a structural shift in the established commercial policy of the state. Yet, the inability of the central government to read the situation and cope with the demands of the day turned the growing profit, gained from the non-agricultural sector of the economy, in unofficial forms of miscellaneous taxes that were never systematically channeled into the pubic finance of the central government.
Authors and Affiliations
Uk Lee
Keywords
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