Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of contributors
- Series editors' preface
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction
- A note on the economics of institutions
- Empirical work in institutional economics: an overview
- 1 Toward an understanding of property rights
- Economic variables and the development of the law: the case of western mineral rights
- 2 Impediments to institutional change in the former Soviet system
- Why economic reforms fail in the Soviet system: a property rights–based approach
- 3 Transaction costs and economic development
- Public institutions and private transactions: a comparative analysis of the legal and regulatory environment for business transactions in Brazil and Chile
- 4 The evolution of modern institutions of growth
- Constitutions and commitment: the evolution of institutions governing public choice in seventeenth-century England
- 5 Regulation in a dynamic setting
- The political economy of controls: American sugar
- 6 Price controls, property rights, and institutional change
- Roofs or stars: the stated intents and actual effects of a rents ordinance
- 7 Regulating natural resources: the evolution of perverse property rights
- Legally induced technical regress in the Washington salmon fishery
- 8 The politics of institutional change in a representative democracy
- A political theory of the origin of property rights: airport slots
- 9 The economics and politics of institutional change
- Paternalism in agricultural labor contracts in the U.S. South: implications for the growth of the welfare state
- Epilogue: economic performance through time
- Author index
- Subject index
- POLITICAL ECONOMY OF INSTITUTIONS AND DECISIONS
7 - Regulating natural resources: the evolution of perverse property rights
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 June 2012
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of contributors
- Series editors' preface
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction
- A note on the economics of institutions
- Empirical work in institutional economics: an overview
- 1 Toward an understanding of property rights
- Economic variables and the development of the law: the case of western mineral rights
- 2 Impediments to institutional change in the former Soviet system
- Why economic reforms fail in the Soviet system: a property rights–based approach
- 3 Transaction costs and economic development
- Public institutions and private transactions: a comparative analysis of the legal and regulatory environment for business transactions in Brazil and Chile
- 4 The evolution of modern institutions of growth
- Constitutions and commitment: the evolution of institutions governing public choice in seventeenth-century England
- 5 Regulation in a dynamic setting
- The political economy of controls: American sugar
- 6 Price controls, property rights, and institutional change
- Roofs or stars: the stated intents and actual effects of a rents ordinance
- 7 Regulating natural resources: the evolution of perverse property rights
- Legally induced technical regress in the Washington salmon fishery
- 8 The politics of institutional change in a representative democracy
- A political theory of the origin of property rights: airport slots
- 9 The economics and politics of institutional change
- Paternalism in agricultural labor contracts in the U.S. South: implications for the growth of the welfare state
- Epilogue: economic performance through time
- Author index
- Subject index
- POLITICAL ECONOMY OF INSTITUTIONS AND DECISIONS
Summary
In most societies individual private ownership of natural resources such as minerals, forests, and fisheries is rare. Unless regulated, open-access conditions will result in overuse of a resource relative to what would prevail under private ownership. Regulation of the commons faces two challenges: (1) the prevention of overuse and (2) exploitation of the resource in the least costly manner. The following essay by Robert Higgs analyzes the causes and consequences of the regulations restricting the catch of salmon in the Pacific Northwest. For the most part the focus is on the costs of regulation rather than on the issue of preventing overuse. Higgs argues that because of the anadromous nature of salmon, the least costly means of catch is the use of upstream techniques or traps at the mouths of rivers, yet legislators have generally outlawed the highly successful catch techniques. The result of the regulations, according to Higgs, is technical regress; we now harvest fewer salmon with more inputs than we did before the regulations were instituted.
Higgs's essay is rich in historical detail. As in the essay by Krueger (Chapter 5), without such historical knowledge the dynamics of regulation would be difficult to understand. For example, sport fishermen today are among the important players in the policy arena and were not a potent force when the original legislation was put in place. It is not reasonable to assume that the original designers could have foreseen the future role of sport fishermen.
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- Empirical Studies in Institutional Change , pp. 244 - 246Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1996