Coevolutionary Development: United States as Demonstration
Term
Coevolutionary Development: United States as Demonstration
Idea level
Application: Development
Definition
Coevolutionary Development: United States as Demonstration refers to Yuen Yuen Ang’s use of 19th-century U.S. development to show how the economy and fiscal capacity coevolved through financial improvisation and crisis-driven adaptation, rather than by establishing “good institutions” from the start. In How China Escaped the Poverty Trap (2016), Ang traces how the U.S. built large infrastructure projects through risky and corruption-prone taxless finance, which preceded modern systems of taxation and fiscal regulation.
Definition of “Coevolutionary Development” (generic theory)
Coevolutionary Development is a theory developed by Yuen Yuen Ang in 2016 that explains political-economic development as a non-linear (mutually adaptive) process in which the economy, governance, or institutions evolve together over time, through zig-zag causal chains, rather than in a linear sequence.
Ang has demonstrated this theory across cases and historical periods: China, Europe, Nigeria, and the United States.
Sources
Empirical demonstration:
Ang, Y.Y. (2016) How China Escaped the Poverty Trap. Chapter 7, Section “The Revolution of Public Finance in the Antebellum United States” [Webpage] [Chapter: Introduction]
Empirical expansion:
Ang, Y.Y. “Fairy Tales of Western Development: The Non-Democratic Origins of Fiscal Capacity in Britain, the US, and China,” Chapter in Political Economy Rebooted (2026), posted on SSRN (2025). Open-access at http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.5661111.
Genealogy
[Paradigm] AIM (Adaptive, Inclusive, Moral Political Economy)
→ [Pillar] Adaptive Political Economy (APE)
→ [Pillar] Inclusive: early U.S. development did not conform to idealized Western templates
→ [Pillar] Moral: exposes fairy tales of Western development through fiscal history
→ [Theory] Coevolutionary Development
→ [Concept] Adaptive Fiscal Capacity (beyond taxation-centered accounts)
→ [Application: Development] 19th-century United States as demonstration of coevolutionary development
→ [Application] Taxless public finance as an early market- and state-building mechanism
Quotes
“I revisit segments of history in the rise of the West from a coevolutionary perspective. My analysis reveals that so-called good or strong (market-preserving) institutions that are widely embraced today as universal causes of economic growth were in fact not the institutions that built markets in early Western societies. Parallel to my findings in contemporary China, medieval Western Europe and nineteenth-century America sparked growth through particular market-building institutions (some of which were uncannily similar to those seen in post-1978 China), which subsequently evolved into market-preserving institutions.”
— Ang, How China Escaped the Poverty Trap (2016), pp. 222-23
“But was this how development really happened in America? Did America, upon the ratification of the Constitution in 1789, begin with a complete package of good institutions?… I reconstruct a trajectory of mutual causal change between America’s state constitutional rules and markets during the antebellum period.
“When viewed from a coevolutionary perspective, it becomes clear that the United States did not in fact acquire a complete package of market-supporting institutions upon independence. Instead, the components of this package were evolved following independence, propelled by the economic depression that grew out of a period of rapid market building.”
— Ang, How China Escaped the Poverty Trap, Chapter 7, “The Revolution of Public Finance in the Antebellum United States,” p. 227-232
“My analysis challenges this selective storytelling. Drawn from diverse but well-established historical literatures, the facts I present are not controversial in themselves. What unsettles some readers are my conclusions: they expose the messy, non-democratic origins of fiscal state formation in the West.”
— Ang, Fairy Tales of Western Development (2025/6)
Concept Constellation
Across Ang’s work, Coevolutionary Development: United States as Demonstration consistently co-appears with the following concepts and analytic themes:
Coevolutionary Development (Ang’s generic theory of political-economic development)
For applications, compare: Coevolutionary Development: China as Demonstration and Nigeria as Demonstration