This chapter analyzes government policies in the three principal Japanese colonies in the five decades up to 1945. It examines the extent to which the Japanese colonial governments in Taiwan, Korea and Manchuria succeeded in centralizing tax and other revenues, in leveraging these revenues in order to borrow, in establishing accountable government fiscal systems and in using revenues from taxes, non-tax sources and from loans to fund not just administration and policing but also expenditures on capital works. We also assess the important body of literature developed over the past five decades that emphasized the more positive aspects of the Japanese legacy, including the agricultural transformation, and the development of industry and transport infrastructure. When viewed in a broader Asian context, Japanese colonial policies were not as exceptional as some scholars have argued. There were a number of similarities with both revenue and expenditure policies in other Asian colonies, and while economic policies did diverge in the 1930s as the military-industrial complex in Japan became more powerful, the outcomes for indigenous populations in Korea, Taiwan and Manchuria were not always positive.

Official revenue collections in French Indochina were low compared with most other colonies in East and Southeast Asia. This fact stands in contrast to a large body of literature that claims French tax demands were a crushing burden on many indigenous people. French Indochina is often put forward as an example of one of the most extractive colonial states in Asia. This chapter reconciles these seemingly opposing interpretations by examining the formation of the colonial fiscal state, its capacity, and the potential impact on the local population. We argue that the French colonial administration is best characterized as complex, bureaucratic, and centralized. Its fiscal capacity was heavily dependant on the expansion and growth of commercial activities. This led to significant geographical asymmetries in wealth generation and investments, and a complex system of budgetary transfers amongst the different levels of administration. French rule was, however, indirect and responded to local differences. Pre-colonial fiscal institutions survived under French colonial rule, but were not adequately recognised in the figures. This reinforces the claim that the burden to the majority of the population was greater than officially recorded, but it was unevenly distributed.