Criminal Law Matters: Bad Check Crime and Economic Development in Postwar Taiwan

This article contributes to law and development literature by investigating the relationship between economic growth and criminal law in postwar Taiwan. Traditionally, law and development studies focuses on laws with direct influences on economic performance. Using the bad check crime as an example, this article demonstrates its importance, substantive and procedural, to Taiwan’s economic development after World War II (WWII). This article finds that, in addition to sanctioning past criminal behavior, deterring future crimes, or acting as an alternative mechanism for maintaining social order, criminal law also served the purpose of backing up Taiwan’s economic growth. Also, despite the criticism accompanying its legal development, the bad check crime persisted and did not get repealed until it lost its economic importance and caused severe social problems due to its overuse. This article hence makes two theoretical contributions. First, criminal law may serve a purpose of economic growth as other economic laws do. Second, such criminal laws get repealed not on legal grounds, but on social-economic ones.