Property Rights, Renewable Resources and Economic Development

This paper analyzes the role of endogenous property rights in the development of an open resource-based economy. I incorporate renewable resources and endogenous decisions on property rights into a convex growth model with the formal and informal sectors. I find that along the transition path to steady state, property rights enforcement is not constant but improves with time as well as involves intermediate property rights specification (between open access and perfect property rights). International trade and labor market are driving these endogenous changes. Property rights improve with favorable terms of trade when the economy exports resource services and stronger property rights help maintain the resource stock by deterring illegal harvest. This pushes labor away from the informal harvest sector toward greater participation in the formal sector of the economy. In turn, more labor participation in the formal sector along with capital formation increase the country’s output and consumption. Overall, with an open economy and well-functioning institutions, renewable resources have a positive impact on economic growth.     

The effects of tariffs on coalition formation in a dynamic global warming game

The prospects for cooperation on climate protection beyond 2012 are currently uncertain. Thus policy instruments which foster participation in International Environmental Agreements (IEA) are in demand. Among the instruments under discussion are trade sanctions. Multi-region optimal growth models are a state of the art tool for integrated assessment, but introducing trade sanctions distorts the competitive equilibrium, making it difficult to compute numerically. We introduce trade and trade sanctions into a model of coalition stability to assess the potential of trade sanctions to support an IEA. Trade is modeled by having all countries produce a generic output good, but adopting national product differentiation (Armington assumption). Coalitions are free to impose tariffs on imports from non-cooperating countries. We solve the model numerically using a refined version of Negishi's [Negishi, T., 1960. Welfare economics and existence of an equilibrium for a competitive economy. Metroeconomica 12, 92–97] basic algorithm. We then apply the model to analyze the influence of tariffs on international cooperation. The model suggests that there is indeed a significant potential to raise participation through trade sanctions, even when goods from different countries are nearly perfect substitutes. Furthermore we investigate the effect of trade sanctions on global welfare, environmental effectiveness, and the credibility of the tariff mechanism.     

Property Rights,Public Enforcement,and Growth

We study the link between public enforcement of property rights, innovation investments, and economic growth in an endogenous growth framework with an expanding set of product varieties. We find that a government can assure positive equilibrium growth through public employment in the enforcement of property rights, if the economic environment is sufficiently favorable to growth and/or if public enforcement is sufficiently effective. However, in terms of welfare, an equilibrium path without property‐rights protection and growth might be preferable. In this case, the enforcement of property rights involves too much reallocation of labor from production and research towards the public sector.     

Impact of international trade under dual labor markets

A country's unemployment rate can be affected by technology choice and the opening of international trade. This general equilibrium model examines the impact of international trade with the presence of dual labor markets in which manufacturing firms engage in oligopolistic competition and choose technologies with different marginal and fixed costs to maximize profits. In a closed economy, it is shown that an increase in labor market efficiency or a population increase induces manufacturing firms to adopt more advanced technologies and the wage rate in the manufacturing sector increases. With the existence of a continuum of technologies, technology choice is not a source of firm heterogeneity. The opening of international trade leads to an increase in the wage rate in the manufacturing sector and the price of the agricultural good. When countries are identical, international trade always increases national welfare.     

Strategic Ignorance as a Self-Disciplining Device

We analyse the decision of an agent with time-inconsistent preferences to consume a good that exerts an externality on future welfare. The extent of the externality is initially unknown, but may be learned via a costless sampling procedure. We show that when the agent cannot commit to future consumption and learning decisions, incomplete learning may occur on a Markov perfect equilibrium path of the resulting intra-personal game. In such a case, each agent's incarnation stops learning for some values of the posterior distribution of beliefs and acts under self-restricted information. This conduct is interpreted as strategic ignorance. All equilibria featuring this property strictly Pareto dominate the complete learning equilibrium for any posterior distribution of beliefs.     

Historical legacies: A model linking Africa's past to its current underdevelopment

Recent studies have found evidence linking Africa's current under-development to colonial rule and the slave trade. Given that these events ended long ago, why do they continue to matter today? I develop a model, exhibiting path dependence, which provides one explanation for why these past events may have lasting impacts. The model has multiple equilibria: one equilibrium with secure property rights and a high level of production and others with insecure property rights and low levels of production. I show that external extraction, when severe enough, causes a society initially in the high production equilibrium to move to a low production equilibrium. Because of the stability of low production equilibria, the society remains trapped in this suboptimal equilibrium even after the period of external extraction ends. The model provides one explanation why Africa's past events continue to matter today.     

Comparative dynamics in a productive asset oligopoly

We build a subgame perfect Nash equilibrium of a common property productive asset oligopoly and analyze separately the impact of a change in the implicit growth rate of the asset and a change in the number of firms exploiting the asset. We show that the steady state level of asset can be a decreasing function of the asset's implicit growth rate. This phenomenon arises when the initial stock of asset is below a certain threshold. In the short-run we show that firms’ exploitation rate can be a decreasing function of the implicit growth rate. We study the impact of a change in the number of firms that share access to the asset. Reducing the number of firms can result, in the long-run, in higher industry production. In the short-run, it can result in an increase of the industry's exploitation and a decrease of the level of the asset's stock.     

Open-access renewable resources and pollution: Trade and policy implications in a two-country model

We examine the interaction between the relative inter-industry pollution externality and resource stock externality of harvesting in deciding trade patterns and welfare gains from trade in a two-country model (less-developed countries) with renewable resources in the absence of resource management. This paper focuses on the impacts of trade policies on resource conservation and welfare outcomes in two countries with different environmental management regimes. Differences in pollution management standards between both countries determine the direction of trade flow and gains from trade in a diversified production case. The country with a lower pollution intensity parameter, an exporter of resource goods, certainly experiences welfare loss in the post-trade steady-state and may also suffer a decline in utility throughout the transition path. However, a country with higher pollution intensity and importers of resource goods tend to gain from trade. Under national open-access resources, given that pollution is regulated up to a certain point in both countries, this study finds that implementing better restrictions on only one externality factor is not optimal from a post-trade welfare perspective. Lastly, from the point of view of policy suggestion, this paper offers an optimal trade policy that the economic and environmental effects of enforcing import tax on resource goods are likely to be Pareto-improving consequences compared to the implications of using an export tax.     

Forward trading in exhaustible-resource oligopoly

We analyze oligopolistic exhaustible-resource depletion when firms can trade forward contracts on deliveries – a market structure relevant for some resource markets (e.g., storable pollution permits, hydro-based power pools) – and find that trading forwards can have substantial implications for resource depletion. We show that when firms’ initial resource-stocks are the same, the subgame-perfect equilibrium path approaches the perfectly competitive path as firms trade forwards frequently. But when the initial stocks differ, firms can credibly escape part of the competitive pressure of forward contracting. It is a unique feature of the resource model that equilibrium contracting and the degree of competition depends on resource endowments.     

Renewable resource management with environmental prediction: the importance of structural specification

Environmental variability can substantially influence renewable resource growth, and as the ability to forecast environmental conditions improves, opportunities for adaptive management emerge. Using a stochastic stock‐recruitment model, Costello, et al. ( 2001 ) show the optimal management response to a prediction of favourable growth conditions is to reduce current harvests. We find this result may be reversed when environmental variability and stock are substitutes in growth, a possibility that has been ignored by resource economists. As an example, we analyze the South Carolina white shrimp fishery, finding the optimal response to a prediction of favourable overwinter conditions is to increase fall harvests.     

Retrading in market games

When agents are not price takers, they typically cannot obtain an efficient real location of resources in one round of trade. This paper presents a non-cooperative model of imperfect competition where agents can retrade allocations, consistent with Edgeworth's idea of recontracting. We show (a) there are Pareto optimal allocations, including competitive equilibrium allocations, that can be approximated arbitrarily closely when trade is myopic, i.e., when agents play a static Nash equilibrium at every round of retrading; (b) any converging sequence of allocations generated by myopic retrading can be supported along some retrade-proof subgame perfect equilibrium path when traders anticipate future rounds of trading.     

On Cost Benefit Rules for Green Taxes

This paper concerns the welfare effects of a green tax reform in a dynamic general equilibrium model with preexisting taxes on labor income and capital income. In comparison with previous studies on green taxes in dynamic models, which have focused their main attention on long run effects of such reforms, I derive cost benefit rules for a change in the tax mix by using the properties of the value function in optimal control theory. This enables me to relate the welfare effect of a change in the tax mix to responses in employment, the capital stock, (flow) emissions and the stock of pollution along the whole general equilibrium path. Another contribution of the paper is to examine under what conditions an emission tax, which is set permanently below the marginal damage of pollution, is welfare superior to an emission tax path that fully internalizes the external effect.     

Shared renewable resources and gains from trade under technology standards

Using a two‐country, two‐good model of international trade, we examine gains from trade and strategic interaction in resource management among countries that share renewable resources such as fishery stocks. Two goods are a resource good, which is the harvest of the shared stock, and some other good that may be thought of as manufactures. The productivity of the resource good depends on harvesting technology and the stock level. This paper focuses on technology standards (e.g., restrictions on fishing gears, vessels, areas, and time) over other methods for resource management because they are most commonly implemented in fisheries. Technology standards are modeled as a restriction on the harvesting technology; that is, under strict technology standards, firms exploit resources as if they are using inferior harvesting technology. We show that an opening up of trade may reduce the shared stock and cause steady‐state utility to decrease in a resource‐good importing country and increase in a resource‐good exporting country. Strikingly, when the shared stock is in jeopardy (a high demand for the harvest), steady‐state harvest is maximized after an opening up of trade by what we call multilateral resource management in this paper and both countries gain from trade.     

Time-consistent protection with learning by doing

Can a government induce efficiency gains in his domestic industry by protecting it against foreign competition? Would such trade protection be time consistent? The present paper builds a dynamic equilibrium model that accounts for learning-by-doing effects that link firms’ strategies over time. The model shows that the existence of dynamic economies of scale suffices to overcome the traditional government's lack of commitment of its tariff policy. This paper compares the infinite horizon Markov perfect equilibrium of this game with the dynamic equilibrium under commitment as well as the static Nash equilibrium. Equilibrium strategies are derived in closed form by solving a linear-quadratic differential game. Optimal trade policy involves higher tariff levels than in the static setup in order to account for future gains in efficiency. Under reasonable assumptions, the unique stable MPE is characterized by a domestic price and tariff that decrease as experience accumulates, thus supporting the future liberalization of trade as an equilibrium feature of this dynamic game.     

With exhaustible resources, can a developing country escape from the poverty trap?

This paper studies the optimal growth of a developing non-renewable natural resource producer. It extracts the resource, and produces a single consumption good with man-made capital. Moreover, it can sell the extracted resource abroad and use the revenues to buy an imported good, perfect substitute of the domestic consumption good. The domestic technology is convex-concave, so that the economy may be locked into a poverty trap. We show that the extent to which the country will escape from the poverty trap depends on the interactions between its technology and its impatience, the characteristics of the resource revenue function, the level of its initial capital stock, and the abundance of the natural resource.     

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.     

Public infrastructure for production and international trade in a small open economy: a dynamic analysis

This paper develops a dynamic trade model with a stock of public infrastructure, which has a property of “unpaid factor of production”. We show that a country with a smaller (larger) labor endowment tends to become an exporter of a good whose productivity is more (less) sensitive to the stock of public infrastructure. We also show that after the opening of trade, the labor-scarce country becomes unambiguously better off but the labor-abundant country may become worse off. Overall, these results contrasts with those obtained in the case of public intermediate goods with a “creation of atmosphere” property.     

Competing engines of growth: Innovation and standardization

We study a dynamic general equilibrium model where innovation takes the form of the introduction of new goods whose production requires skilled workers. Innovation is followed by a costly process of standardization, whereby these new goods are adapted to be produced using unskilled labor. Our framework highlights a number of novel results. First, standardization is both an engine of growth and a potential barrier to it. As a result, growth is an inverse U-shaped function of the standardization rate (and of competition). Second, we characterize the growth and welfare maximizing speed of standardization. We show how optimal protection of intellectual property rights affecting the cost of standardization vary with the skill-endowment, the elasticity of substitution between goods and other parameters. Third, we show that, depending on how competition between innovating and standardizing firms is modelled and on parameter values, a new type of multiplicity of equilibria may arise. Finally, we study the implications of our model for the skill premium and we illustrate novel reasons for linking North–South trade to intellectual property rights protection.     

Shared Renewable Resources: Gains from Trade and Trade Policy

This paper examines the effects of international trade and trade policy in a two‐country, two‐good model with an open‐access renewable resource that is internationally shared. We show that both countries may still benefit from trade when they specialize in the production of their comparative advantage good, although the shared resource is reduced by trade. In addition, we demonstrate that the steady state utility of a resource‐good importing country may be reduced by trade, even if it specializes in the production of a non‐resource good. Import tariffs and export taxes on a resource good may increase or decrease the shared stock level depending on the production patterns in a trading steady state. The trade policy is likely to be Pareto‐improving when the shared stock rises, while both countries may be made worse off by the trade policy when the shared stock falls.     

Markov equilibria in dynamic matching and bargaining games

Rubinstein and Wolinsky [Rev. Econ. Stud. 57 (1990) 63] show that a simple homogeneous market with exogenous matching has a continuum of (non-competitive) perfect equilibria; however, the unique Markov-perfect equilibrium of this model is competitive. By contrast, in the more general case of heterogeneous markets, even the Markov property is not enough to guarantee the perfectly competitive outcome. We define a market game that allows for heterogeneous values on both sides of the market and exhibit a number of examples of (non-competitive) Markov-perfect equilibria, with and without discounting. Unlike the homogeneous case, these equilibria allow for inefficient trades and for trade at non-uniform prices. The non-competitive equilibrium may be unique.