Institutions and environmental governance: A reconceptualization

This article presents the conceptual revisions needed to extend the new institutional approach to environmental governance from its current local and international domains of application to all governance solutions, including national environmental and natural resource use policies and multi-level governance solutions that are increasingly used to address global environmental change. The article suggests that environmental governance is best understood as the establishment, reaffirmation or change of institutions to resolve conflicts over environmental resources. It also explains why the choice of these institutions is a matter of social justice rather than of efficiency. The article suggests a way to understand formal and state-centered governance solutions as forms of collective ownership not unlike common property. The article demonstrates how institutional analysis can gain resolution by looking at the functional and structural tiers, organization of governance functions, and formulation of key institutional rules as key aspects of the design of governance institutions.     

论环境资源产权制度功能

环境资源产权制度功能是环境资源产权制度对整个经济关系和经济运行的作用,是环境资源产权制度内在的并与环境资源产权制度的内在属性相联系,适当的环境资源产权制度安排可以更为充分地发挥其内在功能。环境资源产权制度的功能主要包括:有效的环境资源产权制度可以促进环境资源合理定价和有效配置、激励环境治理技术创新、促进经济持续有效增长和收入合理分配。     

Optimal dynamic risk sharing when enforcement is a decision variable

Societies provide institutions that are costly to set up, but able to enforce long-run relationships. We study the optimal decision problem of using self-governance for risk sharing or governance through enforcement provided by these institutions. Third-party enforcement is modelled as a costly technology that consumes resources, but permits the punishment of agents who deviate from ex ante specified allocations. We show that it is optimal to employ the technology whenever commitment problems prevent first-best risk sharing and fixed costs are sufficiently low, but never optimal to provide incentives exclusively via this technology. Commitment problems then persist and the optimal incentive structure changes dynamically over time with third-party enforcement monotonically increasing in the relative inequality between agents.     

Management of non-timber forestry products extraction: Local institutions, ecological knowledge and market structure in South-Eastern Zimbabwe

Common-pool resources (CPRs), such as forests, water resources and rangelands, provide a wide variety of economic benefits to forest-fringe dwellers in semi-arid areas of southern Africa. However, the public nature and competition involved in the use of these goods, and weak enforcement of institutional arrangements governing their use may lead to resource degradation. Using survey data from four communities in south-eastern Zimbabwe for 2008 and 2009, this paper examines the extent to which forest degradation is driven by existing common property management regimes resource and user characteristics, ecological knowledge and marketing structure. A Principal Component Analysis indicates that the existence of agreed-upon rules governing usage (including costs of usage), enforcement of these rules, sanctions for rule violations that are proportional to the severity of rule violation, social homogeneity, and strong beliefs in ancestral spirits were the most important attributes determining effectiveness of local institutions in the management of CPRs. Empirical results from a regression analysis showed that resource scarcity, market integration, and infrastructural development lead to greater resource degradation, while livestock income, high ecological knowledge, older households, and effective local institutional management of the commons reduce resource degradation. The results suggest that there is need for adaptive local management systems that enhance ecological knowledge of users and regulates market structure to favour long-term livelihood securities of these forest-fringe communities.     

Enforcement of Property Rights and Underdevelopment

The authors formalize the role of legal infrastructure in economic development in a general‐equilibrium model with endogenously determined property rights enforcement. The mutual importance of property rights protection and market production is illustrated by the model's multiplicity of equilibria. In one equilibrium, property rights are enforced, and market activity unhampered. In the other, property rights are not enforced, discouraging economic activity, which leaves the economy without the resources and the incentives to enforce property rights. Even identically endowed economies may therefore find themselves in very different equilibria.     

Governance during Social Transformations: Challenges for Africa

The governance advice that is offered to Africa usually identifies a list of ‘good governance’ goals like stable property rights, a rule of law, low corruption and government accountability as preconditions for development. These goals are difficult to implement not only because they are expensive public goods but in addition their enforcement is typically at variance with powerful interests in the political settlements of developing countries. The historical evidence and much institutional theory suggests that during their social transformations successful developing countries had a different set of ‘developmental’ or ‘growth-enhancing’ governance capabilities that enabled their states to support critical property rights transformations and assist firms in acquiring and learning to use new technology. The institutions and policies they used differed because their political and institutional starting points were different. There are therefore no blueprints for Africa or anywhere else, but certainly the good governance menu is unrealistic. Rather African countries have to experiment and develop institutional and policy solutions that work in their context and which are appropriate for transforming property rights and accelerating technology adoption.     

中国企业产权改革浅析

在西方现代产权制度理论的基础上,剖析中国现代企业在产权制度改革上的不足,进一步探讨在新经济中,如何深化对国有产权制度的改革,塑造符合社会主义市场经济的又有活力的国有资产产权结构,以及充分认识私营企业在产权发展中的弊端,如何帮助私营企业引进先进的现代产权管理方式,打破现有的产权束缚,完善企业治理机制,发挥私营企业的巨大潜力。     

Endogenous institutional change after independence

Independence from colonial rule was a key event for both political and economic reasons. We argue that newly independent countries often inherited sub-optimal institutional arrangements, which the new regimes reacted to in very different ways. We present a model of endogenous changes in property rights institutions where an autocratic post-colonial elite faces a basic trade-off between stronger property rights, which increases the dividends from the modern sector, and weaker property rights that increases the elite's ability to appropriate resource rents. The model predicts that revenue-maximizing regimes in control of an abundance of resource rents and with insignificant interests in the modern sector will rationally install weak institutions of private property, a prediction which we argue is well in line with the experience of several developing countries.     

GRAZING ON PUBLIC RANGELANDS: AN EVOLVING PROBLEM OF PROPERTY RIGHTS

Competition for publicly owned natural resources may be intensified when property rights are incomplete. Incomplete delineation of these rights among claimants to the various resource attributes of the public rangelands of the western United States has resulted in high transaction costs for capturing and/or protecting unassigned rights. This paper addresses how changes in the values society places on the public land resources have resulted in changes in the relative positions of various interest groups with respect to resource allocation decisions. The paper concludes by discussing implications of the property right approach for land management policies and grazing fees.     

Governance Reforms and Growth: Some Ideas from Economic Theory

Ideas from the theory of incentives and organization are deployed to examine how some aspects of economic governance—primarily protection of property rights, enforcement of contracts, and oversight regulation—can be improved for achieving better economic growth and development. Some suggestions for reform of governance institutions in developing countries are offered.     

Property Rights,Governance, and Economic Development

In this review article we give an intuitive account of why good institutions in general, and secure property rights in particular, matter for economic growth and development. We also discuss implications for good governance, defined as the efficient provision of property rights and other aspects of governance. Finally, we briefly touch on political institutions that might be conducive to good governance and thus economic development.     

我国旅游资源产权安排:一个新的分析框架

随着旅游产业的发展,旅游资源的外延逐渐扩大,旅游资源产权问题越发复杂.如果依然笼统地实行僵化的旅游资源管理模式,不但会使资源的利用效率降低,而且会对资源本身造成极大的危害.本文基于产权的角度,在对旅游资源重新进行分类的基础上,构建新的旅游资源产权体系,进而根据不同产权的有效性条件,提出了调整旅游资源的具体管理、运行制度的思路.     

从控制到协调：企业治理目标的演进

企业的治理目标可以理解为企业的价值取向,即企业应该为谁服务,为谁而存在？企业治理目标也体现在维护企业内创造价值的关键性资源的完整性,并通过价值分配来激励这些关键性资源。传统的物质资本密集型企业其关键性资源具有产权特性,控制企业产权便可以维持企业的价值创造能力,同时也可以获得相应的价值分配权,因此物质资本密集型企业的治理目标便是控制企业的关键性物资资本,并为其服务。而在人力资本密集型企业中,创造价值的关键性资源无法通过产权加以控制,需要凭借关系型契约来协调。此时,只有妥善协调企业内的关键性资源,才能维持企业的价值创造能力,所以人力资本密集型企业的治理目标由控制转变为协调企业内的关键性资源。企业家通过关系型契约协调关键性人力资本的关键是让人力资本感知与企业合作的收益要大于不合作的收益,切实保证人力资本有权参与分享与企业合作所产生的收益,从而提高关系型契约自我实施的能力。     

Property Regimes as Information Regimes: Efficiency and Economies of Joint Production

The paper argues that it is useful to view property regimes asinformation regimes. A conceptual model and numerical example are usedto show that, under some reasonable assumptions, a common propertyregime is preferable to a private property regime when property regimesare viewed as information regimes. The paper considers a case ofidiosyncratic risk in a dynamic grazing context where the marginality ofthe resource is such that insurance markets are thin or non-existent.Agents are thought to be risk averse and exogenous enforcement of a risksharing scheme is not feasible. The policy implication is that theestablishment and maintenance of a common property regime is shown to bea (possibly) reasonable institutional response in the face of difficultand particular circumstances when property regimes are viewed asinformation regimes.     

Endogenous growth and property rights over renewable resources

We study how different regimes of access rights to renewable natural resources – namely open access versus full property rights – affect sustainability, growth and welfare in the context of modern endogenous growth theory. Resource exhaustion may occur under both regimes but is more likely to arise under open access. Moreover, under full property rights, positive resource rents increase expenditures on manufacturing goods and temporarily accelerate productivity growth, but also yield a higher resource price at least in the short-to-medium run. We characterize analytically and quantitatively the model׳s dynamics to assess the welfare implications of differences in property rights enforcement.     

The commons,common property,and environmental policy

The conceptual confusion among property, common property, open access resources, and the tragedy of the commons is identified and rectified. Property rights are defined and clarified. From that it is possible to understand the traditional confusion between open access resources and common property resources. It is urged that common property regimes be used in place of common property resources. This will emphasize that institutional arrangements are human creations and that natural resources can be managed as private property, as common property, or as state property. It is the property regime — an authority system — that indicates the rules of use of a variety of natural resources.     

试论产权激励的两个层面

现代产权激励分为两个层面,一个是微观层面,另一个是宏观层面.西方产权理论侧重于微观与效率分析,却无法解释经济增长和政府职能在宏观层面上对产权激励的影响.中国在经历了30年改革之后,社会的进一步转型需要剖析政府在宏观层面上的产权激励.     

The competitive enforcement of property rights in medieval Japan: The role of temples and monasteries

Medieval Japanese governments only haphazardly enforced claims to scarce resources. Necessarily, this presented landholders with a void. To obtain the enforcement they needed, many turned to institutions affiliated with the fractious Buddhist faith instead. Temples and monasteries enjoyed an exemption from tax on their lands and controlled an array of financial and human resources with which they could adjudicate and enforce claims to scarce resources. To obtain access to that exemption and those resources, landholders “commended” their rights in land to them, and paid them a share of the harvest. In exchange, the temples and monasteries exempted them from tax, adjudicated disputes internal to the estate and protected their estates against external threats. Effectively, the temples and monasteries competed in a market for basic governmental services.By helping to secure basic claims to property, the temples and monasteries helped to promote investment and growth; by competing against the government itself, they helped to forestall the crippling effect of a predatory monopolistic state.     

Why do many resource-rich countries have negative genuine saving?: Anticipation of better times or rapacious rent seeking

We investigate the Hartwick rule for saving of a nation necessary to sustain a constant level of private consumption for a small open economy with an exhaustible stock of natural resources. The amount by which a country saves and invests less than the marginal resource rents equals the expected capital gains on reserves of natural resources plus the expected increase in interest income on net foreign assets plus the expected fall in the cost of resource extraction due to expected improvements in extraction technology. Effectively, depletion is then postponed until better times. This suggests that it is not necessarily sub-optimal for resource-rich countries to have negative genuine saving. However, in countries with different groups with imperfectly defined property rights on natural resources, political distortions induce faster resource depletion than suggested by the Hotelling rule. Fractionalised societies with imperfect property rights build up more foreign assets than their marginal resource rents, but in the long run accumulate less foreign assets than homogenous societies. Hence, such societies end up with lower sustainable consumption and are worse off, especially if seepage is strong, the number of rival groups is large and the country does not enjoy much monopoly power on the resource market. Genuine saving is zero in such societies. However, World Bank genuine saving figures based on market rather than accounting prices will be negative, albeit less so in more fractionalised societies with less secure property rights.     

Endogenous strength of intellectual property rights: Implications for economic development and growth

The key institution that determines sustained growth in R&D-based growth models is the strength of intellectual property rights, which are usually assumed to be exogenous. In this paper we endogenize the strength of the intellectual property rights and show how private incentives to protect these rights affect economic development and growth. Our model explains endogenous differences in intellectual property rights across countries as private incentives to invest in property rights generate multiple equilibria. We show that the resulting institutional threshold offers an explanation for why the effect of a transfer of institutions from one country to another depends on the quality of the institutions that were imported.