The Laws of Economic Rent and Property:

A bstract Economic rent in general, and oil rent in particular, is an historically-specific, social category, reflective of unique property relations , which goes beyond the conventional notion of physical scarcity prevailing in economics literature Neither the Ricardian theory nor the neoclassical general equilibrium theory suitably explain the nature of the capital-land relation and convey an understanding of the priority of their mutual interaction within the production process Being an effect of specific property relation, the phenomenon of rent merely assumes the status of a special category applicable to the concrete conditions of some industries Hence, political economy lacks a general theory of rent
The concept of oil rent is based on the potentially conflicting interaction of ownership of oil reserves , and that of the oil leases , within the global oil industry The oil rent is the result of the transformation of the existing differential productivities of oil-producing regions within the global oil industry The formation of global oil prices and differential oil rents rest on the global competition which has become a distinguishing feature of this industry since the early 1970s     

从人力资本角度论"共"有制

马克思理论认为社会主义取代资本主义的表现形式为产权的私有制转变为公有制,其最高表现形式为共产主义。当前我国在全面建设社会主义市场经济的同时,人们似乎在有意无意地回避共产主义,这种信仰危机将危及人们对马克思理论的理解,从而歪曲并最终放弃马克思理论。本文拟从人力资本角度探讨传统资本主义时代不对等契约下物质股权资本对人力资本的"寻租"与"准租",新经济时代人力资本对经济主体的专用性增强使得人力资本由债权性资本转为股权性资本,物质股权资本与人力资本共同享有剩余收益的索取权,从而在实质上实现"共"有制。     

Saving the Commons in an Age of Plunder

Land ownership, as commonly understood today, originated with the enclosure movement during the English Tudor era almost four centuries ago. Karl Polanyi referred to this “propertization” of nature as the “great transformation.” That land, water, and air was a social commons is now archaic and forgotten, and with it the classical economic concept of rent, which was, in theory, once paid to royalty as the earth's guardian. Garrett Hardin's article, “The Tragedy of the Commons,” raised alarm about the abuse and loss of this realm, and he recommended constraints and privatization to prevent this. Most people view titles to landed property much as they do their household goods, but Henry George saw that the earth should be seen as a common resource and its value taxed to benefit everyone. This would restore economic equilibrium to market exchanges and pay for government services. The capture of natural resource rents can supplant taxes on wages and capital goods, and it comports with all textbook principles of sound tax theory. This policy can be the modern replacement for the commons, and implementing resource rent capture is both economically and technically feasible.     

Resolution of Demand Uncertainty and Competitive Rent Adjustment

This article shows that even when the tenants can acquire the information about rents at no cost, it is possible to get rent dispersion if there is uncertainty about the demand in the market. The equilibrium with rent dispersion has the property that rents rise with the arrival of new tenants. However, even though identical units are offered at different rents, each unit generates zero expected profits. This is because a unit offered at a high rent has a smaller probability of being rented than does a unit offered at a lower rent. If demand uncertainty is resolved sequentially, then rents reveal an increasing trend through time because units with lower rents are rented before units with higher rents. Vacancies are also possible in the current model because some of the units with higher rents might not be rented depending on the realization of total demand in the market.     

Corporate venturing and the rent cycle

This study views entrepreneurial rents as renewable opportunities and explores how firms can effectively utilize corporate venturing to create and sustain economic rents. Schumpeterian entrepreneurs create rents by harnessing corporate venturing to exploit attractive economic opportunities. The Schumpeterian rent is composed of Ricardian and Austrian rents. Ricardian rents result from unique and non-reproducible characteristics or competencies of the firm, and hence, are not appropriable by imitators. Conversely, Austrian rents, or economic profit, are subject to dissipation by imitators and attract entry by competitors or Austrian entrepreneurs until they are bid to zero or destroyed by another Schumpeterian innovation. In this formulation, Austrian entrepreneurs are modeled as infra-marginal rent seekers. Consequently, to sustain rents, firms must cycle between using corporate venturing to create or discover Schumpeterian entrepreneurial opportunities and using venturing as a mechanism to exploit existing rent generating opportunities.     

Recombinant Urbanization: Agrarian–urban Landed Property and Uneven Development in India

This article develops the concept of recombinant urbanization to show how agrarian landed property and land‐based caste/class relations shape the production of post‐liberalization urban real estate markets in India. I focus on two interrelated but differentiated agrarian property regimes in western Maharashtra to argue that real estate development is building on prior uneven agrarian land markets, which were themselves sociotechnically produced by colonial and postcolonial development politics. Through an examination of the organizational form of sugar cooperatives, which mediated agrarian capitalism in an earlier era, I track how these primary agricultural cooperatives are now being reorganized into real estate companies, sometimes with former sugarcane growers as company shareholders. The same caste‐based political and social capital that made sugar cooperatives possible in a capitalist agrarian society is now being leveraged by agrarian elites to ease their own and their constituents’ entry into an urbanizing economy. The concept of recombinant urbanization opens new methodological entryways to analyze the entangled agrarian and urban question in predominantly agrarian and late liberalizing societies.     

Social Relations of Landed Property: Gentrification of a Polish Enclave in Brooklyn

Despite the extensive literature on ethnic enclaves in American cities, the role of landed property in ethnic enclave formation and transformation has received no attention to date. Drawing upon nearly four years of work as a tenant organizer, I address this issue by examining how the social relations of landed property have been integral to the formation, transformation, and deterioration of ethnic ties among Polish migrants in Greenpoint, Brooklyn. Specifically, I argue that the social relations of property among Polish migrants—what I call “enclave property”—have enabled the acquisition, maintenance, and improvement of landed property in and through the production of ethnicity. With the gentrification of the neighborhood, however, the social relations of immigrant housing that helped produce the enclave in the 1980s and 1990s have been strained, and rising property values have transformed relations of ethnicity among Polish migrants into mechanisms for property accumulation by dispossession. The upshot has been the “hollowing out” of the enclave, as Polish migrant tenants have been displaced from Greenpoint, leaving behind a co‐ethnic landlord class and their wealthier American tenants.     

Can Labor-capital Models Predict the Responses of Agrarian Societies to Development?Part II: Alternative Models

SUMMARY. Part II of this article presents a model that accords with the needs stated in Part I which appeared in the previous issue of this Journal. It noted that development efforts and economics have relied upon two-factor, capital and labor neoclassical economic models . FAailures have occurred when they were applied to agrarian societies where the ownership of land rent dictates particular institutional forms that engender resistance to development. It was argued that there is need for a new three-factor development theory which explicitly models land and its rent. Ideas of Smith, Ricardo, George and Samuelson -were assembled as a basis for a computer simulation model that explores landed institutions and the land value flows resulting from different development strategies.     

Diversification by Urbanization: Tracing the Property‐Finance Nexus in Dubai and the Gulf

This article explores the role of liberalized real estate markets in shaping financial‐sector development in the Arab Gulf region. Since 2001, record oil revenues and the inflow of repatriated wealth into the region have generated immense demand for new, productive destinations for surplus capital. Gulf Cooperation Council states have subsequently undergone rapid growth that is intimately tied to the regulatory transformation of urban real estate markets and the circulation of surplus capital from oil rents to the ‘secondary circuit’ of the built environment. With an emphasis on the city of Dubai, we employ the notion of diversification by urbanization to trace the re‐regulation of real estate markets and highlight how these strategies have subsequently shaped Gulf financial markets. Through an examination of the impacts of real estate mega‐project development on local banking credit, equities and Islamic financial markets, we reframe recent urbanization in the region as a process of financial re‐engineering, and identify the emergence of capital groups whose accumulation activities are tightly connected to both the real estate and financial circuit.     

Site Value Taxation and the Timing of Land Development

A bstract . Recent writers have challenged the traditional view that a tax on site value is neutral, but there is still disagreement as to the effects of the tax. The site value tax affects the timing of land development in that it provides an incentive for landowners to develop land sooner than under a property tax levied on improvements also. Confusion has resulted from a failure to distinguish market value from development value. The incidence of the site value tax must take into account the dynamics of untaxing capital and of the capitalization of the tax increase on land values , as well as of the resulting increase of land supply and its effect in further reducing land values. The increased profitability of capital improvements could then increase land rent from the demand side. Obviously, amidst such dynamic changes, the overall effect on land values and rents is unsettled pending further research.     

Beyond Gentrification: Hegemonic Redevelopment in Hong Kong

Like other concepts, gentrification must be situated in the socio‐historical context in which it was produced. Since its coinage the concept has travelled widely, yet it has been applied unevenly, and in some cases uncritically, in various locations now including Asian cities. This essay challenges the application of the concept of gentrification to Hong Kong, as attempted by an article previously published in this journal. It responds through two main lines of inquiry. First, it demonstrates how the absence of historical, geographical and socio‐political context weakens the basis for a critical urban geography. Second, in constructing a historical baseline, this essay proposes to conceive urban redevelopment through hegemony‐cum‐alienation, which is a more complicated process than displacement of the working class. Alienated hegemonic redevelopment perpetuates systemic reproduction and associated power politics, yet with the primary source of contradiction residing in landed and property relations. Conclusions suggest the urgency of developing new approaches instead of relying on more empirical studies as evidence for an already over‐developed concept. Analysis of the Hong Kong case suggests how the spent concept of gentrification could be superseded by alternatives.     

房租波动与政府干预

房租的逐渐上涨及其变动原因成为近期关注的焦点之一。本文分析了城市房租波动的四个典型化特征,并讨论了影响城市房租波动的若干因素,其中包括房价变动及以收入和利率表征的基本面因素,也包括投机需求和政府限购政策及房产税等。最后,我们分析了政府干预房租的可能性和形式。     

旁租波动与政府干预

房租的逐渐上涨及其变动原因成为近期关注的焦点之一。本文分析了城市房租波动的四个典型化特征,并讨论了影响城市房租波动的若干因素,其中包括房价变动及以收入和利率表征的基本面因素,也包括投机需求和政府限购政策及房产税等。最后,我们分析了政府干预房租的可能性和形式。     

The Effect of Public Social Housing on Households' Consumption in France

The French public social housing sector offers rents which are more than 60% below market levels. The “loss” of the public sector landlords, estimated from the rent they could get for their apartments at market prices, amounts to 37 billion Francs per year for the 3 million public social apartments in France. This allows the social sector tenants to consume 10% more housing services and 11% more of other goods. The corresponding surplus gain is around 34 billion Francs. The surplus loss for the collectivity due to these transfers is thus 3 billion Francs, 8% of the transferred sums. As compared to personal housing subsidies, which represent half this amount for the same tenants, the surplus gains are much less concentrated on the poorest part of the population.     

Wage versus efficient bargaining in oligopoly

This paper combines internal bargaining between firms and their employees with a situation of imperfect competition, in particular a Cournot‐oligopoly. Wage bargaining is compared with simultaneous negotiations on wages and employment (efficient bargaining). It turns out that for a large range of parameter values a prisoner's dilemma concerning profits exists. The dominant strategy is efficient bargaining, while the joint profits are maximized with wage negotiations. A simplified example considers economic welfare and utility of the unions. Different welfare measures are considered like the usual IO measure of consumer and producer surplus as well as others. The term ‘efficient bargaining’ is not justified (at least for the present example) if the profits and the rents of the unions are considered, as these are maximized with wage bargaining. However, consumer and producer surplus are highest with efficient bargaining. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

The Classical Base of Modem Rent Theory

Abstract . Adam Smith considered rent a surplus which arises because some produce sells for a price in excess of the cost of production. Thus rent is price-determined rather than price determining. Thomas Malthus contributed the beginnings of the differential theory of rent, endeavoring to show that rent will not arise until land of inferior quality is taken under cultivation. David‘Ricardo fully developed the theory of rent which is named Ricardian: rent is a surplus in the form of a differential. Henry George brought the classical position to its logical conclusion: rent is an unearned increment.     

Labour relations,economic development and democracy in the 21st century

Within the context of the transformation of capitalist society in the last third of the twentieth century–a decline in the relative importance of manufacturing both in terms of GDP and employment, changes in the conception of work as mental rather than manual and in the types of interaction between capital and labour - labour relations systems in the twenty-first century will be very different from those prevailing today.     

我国资本市场审计寻租及其治理对策研究

本文明确定义资本市场审计寻租的涵义与分类，深入分析我国资本市场审计寻租的产权机理和审计寻租的影响，并结合产权理论提出对审计寻租的治理对策。     

公共租赁住房租金定价方法比较研究及其借鉴

从英国开始推行公共租赁住房以来,公共租赁住房已经有几百年的历史。公共租赁住房的租金定价关系到政府的财政负担、社会投资者的收益和保障对象的可支付性,因此成为学术探讨和实践中的热点问题。本文总结了国内外公共租赁住房定价的影响因素,总结了定价方法,分为市场法、成本法和收入法,分析了各自的优劣势。并且结合北京公租房项目实践设想了一种综合上述三种方法的定价方法,具体为：在提供政策性土地和金融支持以及税费减免基础上,先测算住房建设规划期内区域单个项目的成本租金,然后根据市场租金设定每个项目的参照成本租金,并且进行多项目参照成本租金平衡。公租房租金和租房补贴分离,租房补贴与保障对象的收入匹配,使保障对象实际支付可负担租金,从而提高定价的效率和公平。     

TAXATION OF ECONOMIC RENTS

Economic rents have long been identified as an efficient tax base. In addition, the recent literature documents that rent income is highly concentrated and that rents are quickly increasing. Rent taxation thus seems attractive for reasons of both efficiency and equity. Nevertheless, rent taxation remains a marginal topic in research and policy making. In a systematic review of the neoclassical literature on different rent types, we find that some types of rents reflect inefficiencies and should thus be minimized, while others reward investments and should be supported in line with social welfare. What remains for taxation are land rents, one of the few true scarcity rents. Land rents have significant potential to improve the efficiency of the tax system. We then begin to develop a comprehensive theory of land rent taxation by identifying relevant efficiency and equity effects. The interaction of many of these effects remains unexplored, which might explain policymakers' hesitation in using land taxes to date.