3 A framework for monitoring and assessing socioeconomics and governance of large marine ecosystems

As access to the Arctic region continues to grow, many land-use issues have become increasingly prominent. The exposure of shorter shipping routes, unresolved maritime boundaries between the bordering states, and most importantly, the plethora of renewable and non-renewable resources in the region have created a strain on international relations between the states bordering the Arctic. Rising global temperatures have created the promise and opportunity of better access to natural resources in the coming years, raising the likelihood of potentially substantial economic gains to the bordering states. However, the current property rights structure in the Arctic, as governed by the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS), dictates that the jurisdiction of each coastal nation state shall not exceed past 200 nautical miles beyond the coastline of each respective state. The goal of this report is to provide an assessment of the basic property rights that govern the Arctic territory in an attempt to illuminate how current and future inefficiencies in natural resource extraction and management can result from a poor property rights structure. The current property rights structure has led to a departure from an efficient allocation of rights and as a result currently operates under an anticommons scenario, while also setting the stage for a tragedy of the commons in the not so distant future. To move away from these sub-optimal outcomes and toward more efficient resource management, open communication, cooperation, and better defined property rights are important components needed to strengthen resource management among Arctic states.
 
 Keywords: Arctic land-use and property rights (assessment of); natural resource extraction and management (inefficiencies in); anticommons scenario; tragedy of the commons; Arctic Council; UNCLOS

We show that in public good problems under asymmetric information, the success of voluntary bargaining is closely related to the structure of property rights. We characterize property rights structures and mediated bargaining procedures that either lead to an voluntary resolution to public good problems, or achieve the outcome but slightly coerce the agents into participation. In this respect, we identify efficient property rights structures. In this paper we show that in public good problems under asymmetric information, the success of any voluntary bargaining procedure is closely related to the structure of property rights in the economy. For clarity of exposition, we focus our attention on the following example: in a town inhabited by n residents, a firm is considering whether to operate a factory that generates pollution as an inevitable by-product. A higher level of production generates a correspondingly higher level of pollution. The firm's profits are increasing with the level of production, and the welfare of the residents is decreasing with the level of pollution. The firm's profitability and residents' preferences are assumed to be private information. The structure of property rights specifies the level of pollution that the firm is entitled to emit into the environment.' For every such economy, we describe and prove the existence of efficient property rights structures. We characterize property rights structures and voluntary mediated bargaining procedures that maximize the sum of residents' utilities and the firm's profit and thus lead to an resolution to the public good problem. Furthermore, we show that these property rights structures are robust to changes in the underlying environment. This suggests that the combination of efficiency-minded legislation that would set the initial structure of property rights appropriately and a mediator who would base his recommendations on an decision mechanism could facilitate the achievement of the outcome. Under some circumstances, however, we show that the mediated voluntary bargaining procedure has to be replaced by compulsory arbitration that coerces agents into agreement. We provide results that show that when the efficient property rights structure is adopted, the degree of coercion that is necessary to obtain the outcome is small. Thus, in contrast to Rob (1989) and Mailath and Postlewaite 1. Our results apply to any public good problem where the costs and benefits of providing the public good are monotonically increasing in the level of provision and where some additional restrictions, to be specified later, are imposed on the form of the utility and profit functions and on the information structure.

The management of forest resources in developing countries is often inefficient and this is particularly the case when forests are a public good managed by the state. These inefficiencies are generally the result of both externalities and free‐riding behaviour. The solution usually considered is to change the property rights structure of the resource, that is, privatisation of forests. It appears, however, that privatisation also has inefficiencies of its own, particularly when it is imposed on local populations. The aim of our contribution is to go beyond the usual state management versus privatisation debate, and to propose instead a property rights structure and related co‐ordination scheme which take into account the specific institutional circumstances of the economic setting in which the natural resources are being exploited. The purpose is to suggest solutions based on the need to attain coherence between the external institutional structure and the behaviour of local players. In others words, the challenge is to establish the conditions necessary for an induced—rather than imposed—institutional change. A property rights structure of a resource must consequently be analysed from two perspectives. The first, and more traditional one, sees property rights as an efficient institutional structure of production enabling a reduction in transaction costs. The second proposes to evaluate any given property rights structure from the standpoint of its ability to offer a solution to the issue of an effective link between the legal framework and the behaviour of the players. Our analysis will make use of our knowledge of the forest of Tiogo in Burkina Faso based on a survey organised in 12 riverside villages, and using a sample of 300 households. The case of the Tiogo Forest suggests that institutional change needs to follow an incremental and path‐dependent process within which the state is invited to play a major role together with the local communities. Indeed the institutional choices of the Tiogo Forest households indicate that they favour an inclusion of the local population in resource management and co‐administration of forestry resources with the state. Such an institutional structure favours a negotiated rather than an imposed scheduling of measures, and seeks a minimum of consensus to ensure the adhesion of actors and users to the new institutional arrangements, whilst limiting the number of bad players. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

In a thought-provoking and important new book, Property in Contemporary Capitalism, Paddy Ireland explores the nature of property in contemporary capitalism. Most analyses of property, he argues, including those offered by property theorists, fail to grasp the empirical realities of modern property, tending instead to offer ideologically loaded accounts which fail, amongst other things, to uncover property’s social relational and class dimensions. Moreover, he suggests, recent developments in property theory—the rejection of so-called ‘bundle-of-rights’ conceptions of property and the emergence of neo-Blackstonian ‘new essentialist’ conceptions that see property in terms of simple person–thing relations (thing-ownership)—are regressive, impeding rather than furthering understanding. Certain forms of property—in particular, property which is used as capital (property-as-capital), much of which is intangible in nature—can only be fully understood when viewed as a social (and class) relation. Although the book is, as the author admits, far from comprehensive in its analysis of property and property theory (there is, for example, only limited engagement with ‘progressive’ property theory), in making these arguments, Ireland outlines an alternative approach to the study and understanding of property that draws on many disciplines, including law, history, anthropology, political economy, and critical finance. In doing this, he reveals important connections between disparate phenomena. Arguing that different sets of property relations and rights structures generate different, historically specific, economic, and social dynamics, he suggests that today’s ‘polycrisis’ is, in significant part, a product of the logic of process generated by our property system and the extension and intensification of that logic brought about by the legal and policy changes to property rights structures over the last half-century—in particular, the financial liberalisation and privatisations associated with neoliberalism.

Ecological compensation is an important means to maintain the sustainability and stability of ecosystem services. The property rights analysis of ecosystem services is indispensable when we implement ecological compensation. In this paper, ecosystem services are evaluated via spatial transferring and property rights analysis. Take the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment (MA) as an example, we attempt to classify the spatial structure of 31 categories of ecosystem services into four dimensions, i.e., local, regional, national and global ones, and divide the property rights structure into three types, i.e., private property rights, common property rights and state-owned property rights. Through the case study of forestry, farming industry, drainage area, development of mineral resources, nature reserves, functional areas, agricultural land expropriation, and international cooperation on ecological compensation, the feasible ecological compensation mechanism is illustrated under the spatial structure and property rights structure of the concerned ecosystem services. For private property rights, the ecological compensation mode mainly depends on the market mechanism. If the initial common property rights are “hidden,” the implementation of ecological compensation mainly relies on the quota market transactions and the state investment under the state-owned property rights, and the fairness of property rights is thereby guaranteed through central administration.

There have been a plethora of researches on the significance of public open space (POS) in contributing to societies' sustainability. However, by virtue of identified maladaptive policy-based-property rights structure, such a shared good becomes vulnerable to tragedy of the urban commons (overexploitation) that subsequently leads to burgeoning number of mismanaged POS e.g., degraded and unkempt urban public spaces. By scrutinising the literatures within property rights domain and commons resources, an objective is highlighted in this paper which is to insightfully discourse institutional property rights structure pertaining to the mechanism, roles and interrelationship between property-rights regimes, bundle of property rights and resource domains; types of goods on how they act upon and tie in the POS with the social quandary. In summary, urban POS tragedy can potentially be triggered by the institutional structure especially if the ownership is left under open-access resource regime and ill-defined property rights which both successively constitute the natures of Common Pool Resource (CPR) within the commons, POS. Therefore, this paper sparks an idea to policy makers that property rights structure is a determinant in sustainably governing the POS in which adaptive assignment of property regimes and property rights are impelled.

Many of the world's most valuable biodiverse areas are successfully managed by indigenous communities, often under peculiar property rights structures. In many cases, these communities are economically disadvantaged, even by local standards. But can particular local property rights regimes which are ecologically successful also allow communities to compete productively in market economies? The extractive reserves of the Brazilian Amazon offer an opportunity for investigating the connections between property rights, conservation and development in the context of tropical forests. This article aims to analyse whether the existing property rights in these reserves — an idiosyncratic mixture of public, collective and private property rights — can support the explicit development aim of a competitive, yet sustainable, exploitation of the area's natural resources. The analysis identifies three promising development paths open to extractive reserves, but points to a fundamental contradiction between the static structure of the property rights system and the dynamic nature of two of these paths. The current design of internal property rights fails to take into account the broader economic context in which reserves must generate a viable revenue stream. If extractive reserves are expected to develop without reliance on external aid, then changes to the property rights structure both inside and outside the extractive reserves have to be explicitly considered.

A POWERFUL WAY OF EXPRESSING the principle of individual liberty is to claim that every individual has full over her body, skills, and labor. The view is that those rights, liberties, and powers that are associated with the ownership of property comprise the rightful sovereignty that each person has over herself within the proscription of harm to others. In short, people own themselves. This principle of self-ownership is also a difficult sticking point for egalitarians who must acknowledge the force of this principle but also see that individuals are born with different talents and skills. Hence allowing individuals to exercise their talents freely an implication of self-ownership -implies, under most conditions, that severe material inequalities will arise. Some egalitarians, in pointing out the moral arbitrariness of differential talents, simply deny self-ownership by assuming the public ownership of skills.' Others in the tradition are more troubled by the conflict between equality and the undeniable intuitive force of the self-ownership postulate.2 In this essay, I want to illuminate this problem by supplying an analysis of ownership and by introducing a thesis concerning the structure of property rights. I will argue that there are two importantly different aspects of ownership which must be considered separately and justified according to crucially contrasting considerations. I will explicate and defend this thesis as a general claim about the ownership rights associated with private property (of any kind) and then return to the arena of self-ownership. Once the distinction I defend concerning the structure of property rights is made clear, I hope to show that the essence of self-ownership can be preserved while instituting mechanisms designed to maintain equality of condition.

Recent articles by Mark Crain and Robert Tollison [1] and Mark Crain, Thomas Deaton and Robert Tollison [2] have examined the response of congressional candidates to changes in the value of seats in the House of Representatives. The theory treats the campaign expenditure of a candidate as an investment in a congressional seat which has an expected present value. A candidate will spend a greater amount to acquire a seat the larger the expected present value of the seat. Several factors influence the value of a congressional seat. Crain, Deaton and Tollison [2, p. 299] argue that one important factor is the size of the federal budget which can be considered "a pork barrel pie that gets split up among legislators". In recent years the United States Congress has passed laws which alter property rights in the private sector. These laws do not directly affect the Federal Budget since they do not involve taxation and/or expenditure decisions. These laws do affect the allocation of resources in the private sector, however, by altering the structure of property rights. If transaction costs are positive (and they are), this activity will change the allocation of resources. Examples of these laws are the 1962 Kefauver-Harris Amendments regarding drugs, auto safety legislation, safety legislation in general, minimum wage legislation, environmental legislation, and wage and price controls. This type of legislation transfers property rights from the private sector to the legislative authority, Since the ownership of rights increases wealth, this shifting of rights should increase the present value of holding a seat in congress. Further, the executive may share in this increased wealth as a result of his power to veto or administer these programs. In summary, we hypothesize that shifting real resources from the private sector to the public, as well as certain changes in the structure of property rights will increase the value of executive and congressional offices. In the test that follows, the size of the real government budget is used to capture the effect on the value of seats from shifting real resources away from the private to the public sector. A dummy for wage and price controls is employed to test

The Constitution stipulates “The property rights of all citizens are guaranteed. The content and limitations are determined by law.” in Article 23 Paragraph 1, and paragraph 2 stipulates the constitutional limitations of property rights by stipulating that “the exercise of property rights should be suitable for public welfare.” And paragraph 3 stipulates that “the expropriation, use, or restriction of property rights due to public necessity and compensation thereof shall be made by law, but legitimate compensation shall be paid.” The separation theory excludes unconstitutional infringement of property rights and guarantees the existence of specific property rights of the subject of fundamental rights. In the case of excessive restrictions beyond social restrictions, according to the separation theory, it is not understood as the expropriation of Article 23 (3) of the Constitution, and various measures (relaxation measures) to alleviate the excessive burden will be considered first. The basic structure of property rights can be divided into 'content regulations without compensation obligations', 'content regulations with (coordinated) compensation obligations', and 'expropriation regulations (with compensation obligations)'. The content regulation of property rights essentially means the protection of property rights in that it forms a property rights legal order, and the expropriation regulation means the restriction of property rights that make it impossible or remarkably difficult to act in the protected area. Therefore, both are independent legal systems.

Competition-as actual behavior rather than theoretic formalism-finds its meaning in the notion of rivalry, but intellectual history holds two distinct notions of economic rivalry, each aligned with a different structure of property rights. The most common, non-technical use of the term describes a contest between two or more parties to achieve the same prize, e.g. economic profits. The contest is open to all rivals in the sense that each has equal access to the relevant economic markets. This requires a structure of property rights that permits ownership to be atomistic, decentralized, and participatory, which in turn allows every seller an equal right to serve customers and every buyer the freedom to choose those goods he wants. It is this wide freedom of action that characterized the competitive model of Adam Smith, who gave the paradigm outlined above its most forceful early expression. In this market system moreover, legal institutions generally uphold property rights in commodities traded as long as they are acquired in good faith without fraud or force. Another kind of rivalry is described by the contest to obtain an exclusive right to serve. The rivalry described by this form of competition is temporary and discontinuous, as compared to the continuous and quasi-perpetual rivalry of open competition. It usually takes the form of competitive bidding to secure a franchise, the monopoly status of which is subsequently sustained by force of law. In this case, the State is the lawful repository of the property right it franchises. Under properly designed contractual safeguards, franchise bidding may result in the manufacture and sale of goods at minimum average total costs of production.' But it will not pass the full test of economic efficiency, where price equals marginal

In their classic paper on the evolution of property rights in the American West, Anderson and Hill take a historical view of the changing costs of defining and enforcing property rights, and show that ...by expressing the amount of property rights definition and enforcement activity as a function of marginal benefits and marginal costs, and by specifying the shift parameters for each function, it is possible to explain the existing structure of property rights in a society and provide a vehicle with which we can analyze changes in property rights over time. The authors show convincing historical evidence for their marginal adjustment hypothesis applied to land and livestock on the Great Plains from 1850 to 1900. In this paper the same viewpoint of endogenous institutional evolution is taken, but it is specified as malleable, changing in discrete jumps due to nonconvex transaction costs and uncertainty in water supplies and property rights rather than through a smooth marginal evolution. Despite a gradual increase in the expected value marginal product of water in the West, this study shows that institutional change is influenced by nonconvexities in costs and the inherent stochasticity in water supply. Because of these conditions, the economically optimal development of water property rights will continue to follow the historical precedence of discrete switches rather than smooth changes in property rights. Discussion of the changes facing water allocation and development in the West has moved from the topic of whether water markets can aid in the reallocation of water to questioning why there are so few examples (Young, Colby, McCormick). Implicit in this question is the assumption that, given the gains from trade based marginal value differences between regions or uses of water and a physical connection between the two locations, trade should occur. Commentators on this subject all recognize that the existence of gains from trade is a necessary but not sufficient condition for trade. The costs

To promote the low-carbon, high-quality development of China’s industrial sector and achieve the national carbon peak goal as soon as possible, this study explores the influencing factors of carbon emissions among industrial sectors. Based on the panel data of 36 industrial sectors in China from 2009 to 2021, the spatial effects and characteristics of industrial sectors are examined by the spatial Durbin model (SDM) based on analyzing the spatial correlation among industrial sectors. The results show the following: (1) Moran’s I statistical results show that China’s industrial carbon emissions have a strong positive spatial correlation, and with time, the spatial correlation between industrial sectors gradually increases. (2) The empirical results of the whole industrial sector show that the property rights structure, capital intensity, and energy structure are the main driving forces promoting carbon emission reduction; the grouping analysis results show that the impact of FDI and property rights structure on the carbon emissions of the industrial sector in different sample groups is different. Among them, the energy structure and research and development play a role in reducing carbon emissions in each sample group. (3) Therefore, in the future, to reduce carbon emissions in the industrial sector, it is necessary to inhibit growth factors and promote the role of reduction factors; optimizing the energy structure and improving the rationality of the property rights structure are effective ways to achieve energy conservation and emission reduction.

Based on the theory of new structural economics, this research aims to explore the dynamic correlation among high-quality development, environmental regulation structures, and property rights structures in China’s construction industry. A panel vector autoregressive model (PVAR) is employed to conduct an empirical study of 30 provinces from 2008 to 2022. To further explore regional heterogeneity, K-means clustering is utilized to categorize the country into three types of regions. The results indicate that strict environmental regulation structures have a beneficial effect on the high-quality growth of the construction sector, which is most pronounced in Region III with a lower degree of construction development. Conversely, state-owned ownership structures are an impediment, and their influence is the greatest in Region I with a higher degree of construction development. Additionally, environmental regulation structures and property rights structures demonstrate a certain interactional effect. The dynamic correlation between these indicators varies in distinct regions. Various regions in China should combine their development characteristics and advantages to reasonably adjust environmental regulation structures and property rights structures. This research provides a direction for structural adjustments for the high-quality development of the construction industry.

I interpret the theory of entrepreneurial discovery from the perspective of the theory of property rights. I analyze pure entrepreneurial profit and the logical construction of the theory as an extension of neo-classical microeconomic analysis and I argue that the key motivation for entrepreneurial discovery, the opportunity to discover pure entrepreneurial profit, is given by the structure of property rights. The structure of property rights determines entrepreneurial claims for pure profit, the level of protection against conflict of interest, costs of exclusive production means and social order.