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.