Government allocation of property rights: Who gets what?

It is widely believed that regulatory programs that confer property rights in the United States represent a device for transferring income from those with less political power to those with more. An analysis of twelve regulatory programs that confer such rights shows that programs do define and allocate property rights according to clearly visible rules; but the rules work to support the economic status quo. To satisfy this paramount political objective, policymakers may sacrifice efficiency. But there is no evidence that they intend these programs to shift wealth from a weaker to a stronger group.     

Monopoly rights in the privatization of telephone firms

Data from utility privatization sales in 74 countries is analyzed to investigate why governments award monopoly rights, and how monopoly affects government revenue from these sales. Financially constrained governments are more likely to award monopoly rights. Interest groups and institutions are important. Increased importance of taxed business users reduces the probability of a government granting monopoly rights, while an increase in the importance of subsidized residential users has the opposite effect. Durable democracies and market-oriented governments are less likely to award monopoly rights. Monopolies increase government revenue by 66 percent.     

Designing property rights for water: mediating market,government, and corporation failures

Recent decades have seen an acceleration in public concern about the allocation of increasingly scarce water supplies. There are many reasons for this concern, such as growth in urban populations. In this article, we focus on how surface water’s special qualities (the combination of spillovers, rent-seeking behavior, and common pool resources) complicate the assignment of property rights in any legal framework. These characteristics make specific market structures necessary in order to efficiently allocate rights. The state usually designs those structures. Yet, just like markets can fail, so can governments fail to effectively allocate those rights. So designers often turn to quasi-judicial conservancy boards as a second-best solution. We argue that those boards may themselves fail through a form of “corporation failure.” We address these three types of failures, and offer an analysis of two cases that suggests that the likelihood conservancy boards will suffer from corporate failure depends on the actions of the boards and outside stakeholders (like governments).

Trust and the protection of property rights: evidence from global regions

In this study, we address the issue of whether trust enhances institutional quality. Despite accumulated research on the topic, comparative studies examining whether such a relationship holds across different regions are rare. Consequently, in this study, we focus on the heterogeneous effect of trust on the protection of property rights worldwide. According to our research, in Western democracies, owing to relatively effective legal systems, trust facilitates cooperation among citizens in utilizing public means to collectively secure properties. In contrast, in other parts of the world, owing to less effective legal systems, citizens with high levels of trust, who presumably have access to many social resources, utilize private means such as informal networks, for protecting property rights. Our empirical analysis of time-series cross-sectional data, and individual-level survey data yields evidence supporting the aforementioned assertion. Moreover, we find suggestive evidence of a causal mechanism linking trust and institutional quality.

     

提升大学生知识产权素质的思考

大学生是我国未来的主人,其知识产权素质较低的现状将严重制约我国在知识经济时代的竞争。知识产权素质是思想道德素质与文化素质的综合,知识产权战略出台后,政府、社会、高校应按战略要求形成合力,全方位提升大学生的知识产权素质。     

Squaring the circle: domestic welfare,migrants rights,and human rights

Domestic welfare reform and the management of international migration in Britain have been described by David Cameron as ‘two sides of the same coin’. Heightened conditions and sanctions for the benefit-dependent domestic population, both in and out of work, are being harnessed as a means of promoting labour market change and reducing demand for low-skilled migrants – often EU workers, whose own access to benefit is being curtailed. Arguments about the post-national expansion of rights and associated cosmopolitan debate implicitly measure migrants rights against a normative model of citizenship as the yardstick of full social inclusion, but with little attention to how far citizenship itself falls short of this promise. Taking Britain as a case study, this paper considers how the concept of civic stratification can further advance analysis of the link between domestic welfare, migration and human rights in a context of intensifying controls for both migrants and citizens.     

The challenges of fractionalized property rights in public‐private hybrid organizations: The good,the bad,and the ugly

Policy designers seeking to harness profit‐driven efficiency for public purposes are increasingly creating organizations with fractionalized property rights that distribute “ownership” among public and private actors. The resulting hybrids are quite diverse, including mixed enterprises, public‐private partnerships, social entrepreneurship organizations, government‐sponsored enterprises, and various other hybrid forms. Marrying public purposes to private sector efficiency and strategic flexibility provides a tempting rationale for mixing public and private owners in hybrid organizations. Because public‐private hybrids involve fractionalized property rights, however, they exhibit tension among owners over both strategy and, more importantly, goals. To understand public‐private hybrids, we assess them in terms of six dimensions of property rights: fragmentation of ownership, clarity of allocation, cost of alienation, security from trespass, credibility of persistence, and autonomy (of both owners and managers). The unclear allocation of fractionalized ownership rights facilitates the appropriation of financial residuals and asset ownership opportunistically. Other weaknesses in the property rights configurations of public‐private hybrids create managerial dissonance or opportunistic behavior that typically leads to a narrowing of goals, but sometimes also to organizational failure.     

Common-property resources: privatization, centralization, and hybrid arrangements

This paper highlights Elinor Ostrom’s innovative and important work on common-property resources (CPRs), which helped earn her the Nobel Prize in Economics. In particular, she showed that neither privatization nor centralization necessarily would fix resource misallocation in CPRs. Ostrom recognized that common owners often developed effective governance that limited access to the CPR and promoted efficient transfers among generations. Through myriad approaches, she identified factors that foster efficient governance in hybrid institutions that are neither market nor state controlled. I use some simple games to illustrate her insights.     

浅析人权、主权和球权的关系

人权、主权、球权是当今人类社会最为重要的三项权利。三者中,人权是核心;主权是人权的延伸,目的是为了保护人权;而球权则是人权和主权的让渡,根本目的是为了在全球化时代维护国家主权和保护基本的人权。因此,可以认为人权是目标,主权和球权则是达成这一目标的手段。