814 FINANCIAL REFORM AND THE ECONOMY
with wage payments funded by taedong revenues. Finally, it acted as a stimu-
lus to trade and commerce by opening up the process of allocation to greater
market transactions than existed before.
The major deficiency of the system was that it was not carried out to com-
pletion. The government still permitted officials to levy tribute for common items
of consumption and governors to demand special and rare products from areas
in their jurisdictions for the consumption of prestigious visitors. It also failed
to establish a uniform system of taxation to eliminate differential provincial tax
rates and create a workable formula for establishing a fair commutation rate
between cloth and grain. The most serious weakness, however, was that despite
transferring the basis of the tax to land, the government failed to maintain an
accurate and periodic survey of arable land to ensure a just distribution of the
tax burden on landowners. By the nineteenth century, the problem of the trib-
ute tax had been converted into a problem of the land tax, which became one
of the major causes of peasant rebellion, but that was a matter of the deteriora-
tion and corruption of the taedong system after it had been established.