Inefficiency and common property regimes

Much of the literature on the commons focuses on the fact that many agents are assigned usage rights simultaneously, but less attention has been paid to the exercise of exclusion rights. The simultaneous exercise of one of the two rights by all the owners of a common causes a problem of overexploitation in the first case (competition “in use”) and underuse in the second (competition “in exclusion”). The relevance of both inefficiencies stems from the way they illustrate the general conflict between individual and collective interests. This paper proposes a formal synthesis of the problems of inefficiency associated with the exploitation of resources in common property regimes. The synthesis takes into account the following features: i) the importance of the consumer surplus for the analysis of the issue; ii) the attitude of economic agents in the face of a reciprocal externality linked to the exploitation of the common; and iii) the social and the private costs of exploitation.     

Institutions,governance and incentives in common property regimes for African rangelands

The general distinctions between open access, state property, common property and private property are now well established in the academic literature. When applied to African rangelands, however, common property admits a wide variety of resource management regimes. To formulate effective policies it is necessary to understand the structure and operations of particular regimes. In this paper we discuss three examples of common property regimes, two from the southern African nation of Lesotho and one from the west African nation of Senegal, to illustrate some of the key characteristics of common property regimes. In particular, it is important to understand the structure of governance, the types of institutions that govern behavior, and the compatibility between governance, institutions and individual incentives. A common property regime can only be effective if its institutions are compatible with the structure of governance. The extent of its effectiveness also depends upon the incentives and expectations of individuals expected to enforce the rules of the institutions or comply with their terms. At present, most African governments lack the organizational capacity and political will necessary to implement state property regimes, official regulations on resource use, or individual property rights for rangelands resources. In many cases it is more appropriate for governments to define and enforce group rights to particular resources, then help to establish conditions in which internal group dynamics yield efficient resource management outcomes.     

Commercial piracy and intellectual property policy

I discuss the competition between a copyright owner and several commercial pirates who sell copies of the same information good to consumers. I view the increased risk of a punishment that offering a pirate copy to a consumer causes as an advertising cost whose value is chosen by the government. The structure of the market for pirate copies is affected also by fixed costs that are caused by punishments or DRM systems. I present a systematic analysis of the effects of these policy variables and the quality of pirate copies on the market for the considered information good.     

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.     

产权界定、产权流动与产权维护

诺斯认为,有效率的产权具有三大激励功能:即降低费用、保证人们的预期收益和使个人的投资收益充分接近于社会收益,这对经济增长起着十分重要的作用。本文认为,要使产权功能真正发挥作用,需要有合理的产权界定、规范的产权流动和公平的产权维护,三者缺一不可。文章从整体观的角度讨论了落实这三者的重要意义和各自存在的问题,并提出了党政分开和政企分开是解决问题的关键。     

Open access,common property and scarcity rent in fisheries

Open access resources are frequently not managed efficiently, resulting in falling stock levels and a declining income for fishermen. In the late 1970's, the policy response to this problem was the implementation of 200-mile fishing zones, which enabled the European Union to formulate and implement the Common Fisheries Policy, aimed at (among other things) conservation and distribution of available stocks. In Germany, this shift from an open access regime towards a common property regime had favourable outcomes. The trend of falling prices was reversed. The conclusion was that intertemporal efficiency had increased as a result of (inter)governmental policy. Apparently, a wedge was formed between price and marginal harvesting costs, implying that scarcity rent had returned as a component of prices.     

Intellectual property rights, technology transfer and exports in developing countries

We develop a model to analyze one mechanism under which stronger intellectual property rights (IPR) protection may improve the ability of firms in developing countries to break into export markets. A Northern firm with a superior process technology chooses either exports or technology transfer through licensing as its mode of supplying the Southern market, based on local IPR policy. Given this decision, the North and South firms engage in Cournot competition in both markets. We find that stronger IPR would enhance technology transfer through licensing and reduce the South firm's marginal production cost, thereby increasing its exports. Welfare in the South would rise (fall) if that country has high (low) absorptive capacity. Excessively strong IPR diminish competition and welfare, however. Adding foreign direct investment as an additional channel of technology transfer sustains these basic messages.     

对企业国有产权交易投招标模式的分析

企业国有产权是我国国有资产的重要组成部分,规范企业国有产权转让行为,有利于加强企业国有产权交易的监督管理。现有监管体制下,可以拍卖、招投标、协议转让以及国家法律、行政法规规定的其他方式进行交易。针对实践中国有产权交易模式存在的问题,对投招标模式进行了分析,提出了交易程序中应注意的问题。     

Moral property rights and harmonious society

To build the harmonious society needs the effect of morality.There are various kinds of moral values.Moral values can be divided into proper ones and improper ones according to whether the social benefit is bigger than the social cost of the moral behavior.The former is helpful to the optimal allocation of resources and improve the formation of the harmonious society; while the latter is harmful to the optimal allocation of resource and bad to the formation of the harmonious society.The proper and scientist moral values include： sustainable development view on ecology,fair,just and win win view on morality,credibility,right view on rich and poor,right view on consumption and so on.To build the proper and scientific moral value,the more important way is building proper moral property rights institution by recognizing properly and constructing moral property rights besides legislation,setting up moral surroundings,valuing moral penetration,strengthening moral education etc. Harmonious society;Moral property rights;Moral value     

Defining national property rights to a common property resource: The case of the West Bank aquifers

This article introduces a methodology to define Israeli and Palestinian property rights to the three aquifers straddling the Green Line between Israel and the West Bank, i.e. the Yarqon-Tanninim, Northern, and Nablus-Jenin aquifers. A set of procedures for determining a fair division of waters is described for the hypothetical planning year 2000. Following this, the calculated allocation of water rights is evaluated in terms of the projected over-all water consumption and supply balance for Israel and a Palestinian sovereign authority (PSA) for the year 2000. Finally, the article concludes with some thoughts on the relative merits of this methodology.     

The Commons with Capital Markets

We explore a dynamic commons problem and assess the welfare consequences of access to capital markets. The commons has a high intrinsic rate of return but its fruits cannot be secured by individual agents. Capital market access allows resources to be held securely and intertemporally transferred, but at a lower rate of return. In a two period model, we completely characterise symmetric consumption and extraction behaviour in four environments: under a strategic and a competitive equilibrium concept, and with and without market access. Strategic equilibria dominate competitive ones: while agents disagree over how to divide the resource, all would prefer it to be larger; the strategic concept allows them to anticipate returns to their conservation. As the number of agents becomes infinite, the strategic outcome converges to the competitive; as the number of agents falls to one, it converges to the planner’s. Market access has a positive effect on welfare owing to its consumption and extraction smoothing properties and a negative effect owing to its creation of an outside option to the commons, encouraging its depletion. A sufficient condition for autarky to dominate market access for some levels of communal endowment is that the world market discount factor exceed the subjective discount factor. Multiple equilibria may arise: these result from market access, not the equilibrium concept. The authors thank Ralph Bailey, Siddhartha Bandyopadhyay, Matthew Cole, Carl Devore, Felix Kubler, Chirantan Ganguly, Martin Jensen, Indrajit Ray, Celine Rochon, Dave Rusin, participants at the Royal Economic Society 2005 and an anonymous referee for valuable comments. They are grateful for funding under the ESRC’s World Economy and Finance programme (RES-156-25-0022).     

Capital and growth with oligarchic property rights

To analyze effects of imperfect property rights on economic growth, we consider economies where some fraction of capital can be owned only by local oligarchs, whose status is subject to political risk. Political risk decreases local capital and wages. Risk-averse oligarchs acquire safe foreign assets for insurance, thus increasing wages in other countries that protect outside investors. We show that for empirically reasonable parameter values, reforms to decrease political risk or to protect more outsiders' investments can decrease local oligarchs' welfare by increasing wages, making such reforms prone to political resistance from the ruling elite. We suggest measures of property rights imperfections derived from empirically observable data, and we test the quantitative predictions of our model using those measures and other parameter values routinely assumed in growth theory.     

制度变迁中土地产权的性质与合约选择:一个有关合作经济的案例分析

This paper discusses an evolutionary process of rural collective property rights or agricultural cooperation economy in detail. We convince that both the evolution of the household contract system and the rural cooperation economy in the market elaborate the key position of property rights’ multi-attribute in the formation of contract structure and organization shape. If there were strong externality between several elements of household, the collective property rights should be chosen. __________ Translated from Guanli Shijie 管理世界 (Management World), 2008, (6): 61–67, 94     

Cooperation in the commons

This paper delineates circumstances in which a first-best cooperative solution can be supported as a subgame perfect equilibrium in a dynamic common property renewable resource game. In a game with nonlinear resource stock effects on cost, we characterize a worst perfect equilibrium that supports cooperation for the widest range of parameter values for the discount rate, resource growth rate, harvest price, and the number of resource exploiters. The strategy profile that we propose is consistent with human behavior observed in experiments and common property resource case studies.We thank seminar participants at the University of Minnesota, the Heartland Environmental and Resource Economics Conference at Iowa State University, Keio University, and two anonymous referees for helpful comments.     

Defining the frontiers of the firm through property rights allocation: The case of the French retailer cooperative Leclerc

France harbours three large retailer cooperatives which, put together, account for more than a third of the national market share. The largest of these is Leclerc, a leading firm on the French territory. The paper presented here shows how, through the particular distribution of property rights and decision patterns, this cooperative, although hampered by an unstable size, manages to compete with integrated firms. Indeed, the processes that have been developed enable the cooperative to acquire long-term property rights on the specific assets (stores), while remaining in the cooperative framework. The system built is efficient because incentives remain high for members to increase their own performance.     

产权改革社会化趋势的理论分析

经济体制转型国家的产权制度改革往往与经济市场化密切相关,在这一过程中,社会生产方式从封闭走向开放化、社会化,一切生产要素都要通过市场为全社会所用。产权的社会化,实现了资本的社会运营,形成了财产权利的社会分解、经济利益的社会分享和风险责任的社会分担,这是现代市场经济发展的必然要求。     

The double dividend, second-best worlds, and real-world environmental policy

The recent series of papers by Bovemberg, Goulder, Parry and others argue that the double dividend is unlikely to exist because of second-best problems. They argue that the imposition of environmental tax in an economy already distorted by income taxes will further distort the economy by reducing incentives to supply labor. Our paper argues that this is not likely to be the case because of the restrictive assumptions made by these models, and because of the role of the environment as a factor of production.     

知识产权网络结构范式研究

现代经济环境下,产业组织呈现出垂直分离的特征,专注于核心能力的不同企业利用知识产权之间的联结关系组成了一种新型的网络组织——企业知识产权网络,提高了对外部环境的适应能力。从产业组织垂直分离出发,首先,探讨了知识产权网络产生的背景,界定了知识产权网络的基本内涵,分析了知识产权网络的构成要素以及主要的联结方式。然后,结合案例讨论了知识产权网络联盟成员的3种类型。研究表明,知识产权网络已经成为现代产业组织的重要形式。     

Payments for environmental services as an alternative to logging under weak property rights: The case of Indonesia

Decentralization reforms in Indonesia have led to local communities negotiating logging agreements with timber companies for relatively low financial payoffs and at high environmental cost. This paper analyzes the potential of payments for environmental services (PES) to provide an alternative to logging for these communities and to induce forest conservation. We apply a game-theoretical model of community-firm interactions that explicitly considers two stylized conditions present in the Indonesian context: (i) community rights to the forest remain weak even after decentralization, and (ii) the presence of logging companies interested in the commercial exploitation of the forest. Intuition may suggest that PES design should focus on those communities with the lowest expected payments from logging deals. However, we show that these communities may not be able to enforce a PES agreement, i.e., they may not be able to prevent logging activities by timber companies. Moreover, some communities would conserve the forest anyway; in these cases PES would not lead to additional environmental gains. Most important, the introduction of PES may increase a community's expected payoff from a logging agreement. A failure to consider this endogeneity in expected payoffs could lead to communities opting for logging agreements despite PES, simply allowing communities to negotiate better logging deals. Our results indicate that PES design is a complex task, and that the costs of an effective PES system could potentially be much higher than expected from observing current logging fees. Using data collected in Indonesia on actual logging fees received by communities, we illustrate how the theoretical results could be used in empirical analysis to guide PES design. Our results are likely to be useful in other cases where local people make resource use decisions but have weak property rights over these resources, and where external commercial forces are present. The results highlight the importance of understanding the details of the local context in order to design PES programs appropriately.     

TRIPS协议弹性条款与中国知识产权立法的完善

知识经济时代,知识产权保护与国际贸易密切相关,催生了《与贸易有关的知识产权协议》(简称TRIPS协议)。TRIPS规则直接影响到各成员方的贸易利益,也极大地影响着社会公共利益。所以,TRIPS协议的产生和实施都围绕着成员间利益冲突的协调和平衡。发展中国家要充分利用TRIPS协议的弹性条款,在其设置的弹性空间中保护自身利益,寻求权利和义务的平衡。我国也要对TRIPS规则的转化和适用进行认真研究,使我国的知识产权立法更加完善。