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From Coercion To Politics To Law: The Evolution Of Property Rights Protection, Fali Huang

Research Collection School Of Economics

This paper shows how property rights security improves over time as a result of increasing legal quality and political democratization in a political economy context, where political and legal institutions adapt to evolving factor composition of land and capital in the dynamic economic development process. There seems to exist a clear sequence of di⁄erent forms of protection in that it is unlikely to have a strong rule of law with an exploitative political regime, or to have a democratic political system when the distribution of potential coercive power is too skewed. The routine form of protection thus shifts from coercion …