Insecure Property Research Articles

Ecosystem-Based Agriculture Combining Production and Conservation—A Viable Way to Feed the World in the Long Term?

This study analyzed examples of sustainable ecosystem-based agriculture where management methods supported livelihoods of smallholders while at the same time local ecosystem services were enhanced in Ethiopia, Brazil, and the Philippines. Participation by farmers and collective actions were found to be a crucial driving force, as local specific knowledge and “learning by doing” were main components of the development. Social cohesion, particularly through associations and cooperatives, and improved marketing opportunities were also important drivers. Furthermore, recognition by authorities at all levels was perceived as crucial. Effects of climate change, insecure property rights, and political instability were potential threats. The possibilities of such systems to be scaled up beyond self-sufficiency raised further questions.

Ergänzende Anmerkungen zum chinesischen Wunder / Some Supplementary Comments on the Chinese Miracle

Zusammenfassung Feng, Ljungwall und Guo haben gezeigt, wie die Ausweitung der wirtschaftlichen Freiheit in China zu beständigem und schnellen Wirtschaftswachstum beigetragen hat. Hier werden vier Punkte ergänzt. Erstens hatte die besonders konsequente Abschaffung der wirtschaftlichen Freiheit vor den Reformen, noch unter Mao beim „großen Sprung nach Vorn“, China in die Katastrophe geführt. Zweitens muss Chinas Entwicklung nicht nur durch interne, sondern auch durch externe Determinanten, wie die Vorteile der Rückständigkeit, die aus der wirtschaftlichen Freiheit im Westen resultieren, erklärt werden. Drittens bleibt Chinas Wirtschaftsentwicklung seit den Reformen trotz vielversprechender Erklärungsansätze ein Wunder, weil die chinesische Volkswirtschaft mit erstaunlich unsicheren Eigentumsrechten und viel Rechtsunsicherheit leben kann. Viertens kann man die Einkindpolitik als den letzten „Sieg“ der chinesischen Planwirtschaft betrachten und als Vorboten großer Probleme.

Insecure Land Rights and Share Tenancy: Evidence from Madagascar

Most studies of tenurial insecurity focus on its effects on investment. This paper studies the hitherto unexplored relationship between tenurial insecurity and land tenancy contracts. Based on distinct features of formal law and customary rights in Madagascar, this paper augments the canonical model of sharecropping by making the strength of the landlord’s property right increasing in the amount of risk she bears within the contract. Using data on landlords’ subjective perceptions in rural Madagascar, empirical tests support the hypothesis that insecure property rights drive contract choice but offer little support in favor of the canonical risk sharing hypothesis. <i>(JEL K11, Q15)</i>

General Happiness or Human Bliss: Jane Marcet's Political Economy in James Morier's Persia

General Happiness or Human Bliss: Jane Marcet's Political Economy in James Morier's Persia

Measuring Institutions: Indicators of Political Rights, Property Rights and Political Instability in Zimbabwe

The current, persistent growth problem in Zimbabwe is often attributed to poor economic and political institutional frameworks characterised by insecure property rights and an unreliable rule of law. An empirical test of this hypothesis presents some methodological difficulties. Although political scientists have been constructing measures of social and political dimensions of societies for some time, such measures are not available over sufficiently long time runs to inspire confidence in their usefulness in being able to address the long-run and dynamic questions that arise when linking economic performance and institutions. The aim of this paper is to assemble a new set of political and economic institutional indicators for Zimbabwe covering the period 1946 to 2005. While the new indices span for a significantly longer time period, they are highly correlated with existing, widely used institutional indices produced by the Freedom House, the Heritage Foundation and the Fraiser Institute for the time periods for which these exist despite having been independently produced. The new dataset contributes towards understanding the institutional dimension of Zimbabwe's persistent economic decline.

Outlaw Economics: Doing Business on the Fringes of the State. A Review Essay

History often reveals itself at the margins. Hegemony becomes tangible at its peripheries, claims to legitimacy are most emphatically articulated where challenged, and rules are best observed in their breach. For this reason, historians have long been drawn to the study of border zones where sovereignty was contested or subverted rather than tacitly accepted. This work by historians is complemented by, although rarely integrated with, research in other disciplines—most notably in anthropology, sociology, economics, and political science. Social scientists have been particularly interested in the question of economic organization, of how individuals and groups structure commercial exchanges in conditions of insecure property rights and unreliable recourse to official contract enforcement. Such research is frequently motivated by public policy concerns, especially the complex issue of institution-building in transition economies and so-called crisis states. While generally more circumspect about the prescriptive powers of their discipline, historians will nonetheless recognize that the defining characteristics of a contemporary crisis state—limited authority of a central government, weak institutions, ineffectual bureaucracies, widespread corruption—also apply to most, if not all pre-modern polities. Therefore, the study of actors on the fringes of political and legal regimes holds the potential to produce important theoretical insights into the construction of alternative, private-order institutions that are of significance beyond a particular period, region, or methodology.

Competition among the elites, property rights protection and economic performance

In this paper, a model is built that investigates how competition among elites interacts with property rights protection for the middle class, and how they influence economic performance, when this interaction is taken into account. It is shown that when property rights of the middle class are less protected, there is more competition among the elites. Therefore, in some circumstances, economic performance improves despite insecure property rights. On the other hand, however, when there exists strong competition among the elites, property rights protection for the middle class decreases. Hence, under some conditions, economic performance worsens even though the competition is high. Furthermore, the paper provides an explanation for why regulation of entry is commonplace around the world.

Political Connections and Trade Expansion: Evidence from Chinese Private Firms

The investigation of the value of political connections has attracted economists' interests in the recent years. This paper, by using a survey of Chinese private firms in 2004, empirically studies the impact of political connections (measured as the deputy to the Chinese People's Congress) on trade expansion. It is found that political connections lead to an increase of trade expansion. Meanwhile, the expansion into other administrative areas requires a high hierarchical level of political connections, i.e., at the corresponding administrative level or above. Furthermore, it is found that political connections affect trade expansion by overcoming insecure property rights institutions and inefficient contracting institutions.

Expropriation Risk and Firm Growth: A Corporate Transparency Channel

We propose a new channel through which expropriation risk reduces capital allocation efficiency and decreases firm growth. We build an agency model of corporate disclosure when companies face risks of expropriation. The model predicts that in countries with insecure property rights, corporations mitigate the risk of expropriation by reducing transparency. We test this channel by employing a difference-in-difference approach. Using a panel of over 16,000 firms from 84 countries, we find that transparency of companies prone to expropriation is lower in countries with insecure property rights. The reduced transparency has an adverse effect on the efficiency of capital allocation and corporate growth.

Demographics and Factor Flows – A Political Economy Approach

Der vorliegende Aufsatz untersucht den Einfluss des demografischen Wandels auf internationale Migrations- und Kapitalflusse unter Verwendung eines polit-okonomischen Ansatzes. So beschranken sowohl die politischen Migrationsbarrieren in den meisten Industrielandern als auch die Enteignungsrisiken in vielen Entwicklungs- und Schwellenlandern die internationale Faktormobilitat. Unter Berucksichtigung heterogener Einstellungen der unterschiedlichen Generationen zu Immigration und Enteignung auslandischer Investitionen, wird der Einfluss des demografischen Wandels auf das Ausmas von Faktorbeschrankungen simuliert. Auf dieser Basis wird untersucht, wie sich Investitions- und Migrationsbarrieren verandern, wenn eine Interdependenz der verschiedenen Politikmasnahmen unterstellt wird. Auf der einen Seite zeigen die Ergebnisse, dass Enteignungsanreize in Entwicklungs- und Schwellenlandern im Zuge der Emigration von jungen Arbeitskraften in Industrielander zunehmen. Auf der anderen Seite nehmen Immigrationsbeschrankungen in Industrielandern durch steigende Kapitalexporte in Entwicklungs- und Schwellenlander zu. Durch die Berucksichtigung der Verflechtung zwischen den Politikentscheidungen wird zudem der Einfluss des demografischen Wandels auf die internationale Faktormobilitat deutlich verstarkt.

TEORETYCZNE I PRAWNE ASPEKTY KORUPCJI W SEKTORZE PRYWATNYM

Corruption is a universal and specific phenomenon of multifactor and multi aspect character and it embraces a lot of shades and types. This establishes a wide understanding of that phenomenon in social science and law. Corruption and bribery are types of fraud and are linked with the private sector too. Although certain types of corruption will decline as the private sector grows and consolidates, other new types involving private sector firms may increase. The commercial corruption can be described as relation inside of an organization and as relation between firms. Weak institutions, an uncertain rule of law, insecure property rights, a lack of corporate accountability encourage the kind of short term focus that makes corruption. Corruption in private sector in Poland is connected with social distrust and specific organizational culture too. Such corruption is a genuine threat and creates new dangerous for further development, causes loss of competitiveness and creates a substitute for fair market and competition in polish economy and abroad.

An intelligent watermarking method based on particle swarm optimization

Meerwald, Koidl, and Uhl (2009) pointed out that the method proposed in Lin et al. (2008) exists potential insecurity. This paper proposes an intelligent watermarking by invoking particle swarm optimization (PSO) technique in wavelet domain to overcome the revealed insecurity issue, furthermore resolve the conflict between imperceptibility and robustness of watermarking. In the proposed method, PSO is fused with the method proposed in Lin et al. (2008) (denoted SDWCQ) to avoid potentially insecurity in Lin et al. (2008). That is, the method of using the fixed block size in one subband and the permutation is unable to disguise which coefficients make up a block. The attacker can utilize the insecure property and analyze the significant difference between bipolar watermarks in Lin et al. (2008) to detect the embedded blocks, furthermore modify the significant difference, and result in unable to extract the watermark. In this paper, coefficients are randomly selected from different subbands to make up a block to promote the disguise. Performance analysis shows that the proposed algorithm obviously outperforms SDWCQ which does not use PSO.

Legal regulations and agricultural production: the case of Cuba's cattle sector

The decrease of production in Cuba's cattle sector has been blamed on technical factors, overlooking the role of the institutional set-up of the sector. The objectives of this article are to describe the sector's institutional framework and to compare the performance of different producer types. The three main producer types differ in their access to illegal markets, in the property rights structure for land and cattle, and in their economic and production success. The fact that at least one of the producer types is successful casts doubt on the prevailing idea that production problems are a result of technical problems. The article analyses how the incomplete and insecure property rights regime in Cuba results in low productivity caused by incentive and other problems.

Rapacious Resource Depletion, Excessive Investment and Insecure Property Rights: A Puzzle

For a country fractionalized in competing factions, each owning part of the stock of natural exhaustible resources, or with insecure property rights, we analyze how resources are transformed into productive capital to sustain consumption. We allow property rights to improve as the country transforms natural resources into capital. The ensuing power struggle about the control of resources is solved as a non-cooperative differential game. Prices of resources and depletion increase faster than suggested by the Hotelling rule, especially with many competing factions and less secure property rights. As a result, the country substitutes away from resources to capital too rapidly and invests more than predicted by the Hartwick rule. The theory suggests that power struggle boosts output but depresses aggregate consumption and welfare, especially in highly fractionalized countries with less secure property rights. Also, adjusted net saving estimates calculated by the World Bank using market prices over-estimate welfare-based measures of genuine saving. Since our theory suggests that genuine saving is zero while empirically they are negative in resource-rich, fractionalized countries, we suggest ways of resolving this puzzle.

Creating Property Rights: Land Banks in Ghana

Insecure property rights over land have multiple ramifications for agriculture and the organization of rural economic activity (Besley and Ghatak 2009). The risk that land will be expropriated deters investment. Insecure property rights reduce the ability of borrowers to pledge land as collateral and thus tighten credit constraints. Ill-defined property right over land can inhibit land transactions – rentals or sales – and potential gains from trade are lost. Scarce resources, like labor, may be devoted to protecting one’s insecure rights over plots (Field 2007). In Ghana, land rights are typically gained by virtue of membership in a corporate group (e.g., extended family), but a robust market is emerging for land purchases and rentals, particularly in urban and periurban areas. Informal land markets in Ghana are beset with a number of problems including land conflicts, protracted litigation and adjudication failures, documentation bottlenecks and uncertainty. Land legislation in Ghana is perceived as incoherent, conflicting and often outdated. An unwieldy public land sector dominates the documentation of land rights, revenue collection and distribution. Land conflicts are becoming more frequent, judicial processes are overburdened, authority is overcentralized and corrupt. Conflict over multiple claims to particular plots occasionally becomes violent. Goldstein and Udry (2008) document the large investment disincentive effects of insecure tenure in agriculture in Ghana. Almost 80% of Ghana’s land is held by customary landowners, mainly families, clans and traditional authorities (Kasanga and Kotey, 2001). These owners often do not record transactions; indeed, many are clothed in secrecy. As land transactions gradually move away from their familial/corporate base to short term rental for commercial purposes, multiple simultaneous transactions on the same plot have be-

Insecurity of property rights and social matching in the tenancy market

This paper shows that insecurity of property rights over agricultural land can have large efficiency and equity costs because of the way it affects matching in the tenancy market. A principal-agent framework is used to model the landlord's decision to rent when he takes into account the risk of losing the land to the tenant and when contract enforcement is decreasing in social distance with the tenant. These effects are quantified for the case of local land rental markets in the Dominican Republic. Results show that insecure property rights lead to matching in the tenancy market along socio-economic lines, severely limiting the size of the rental market and the choice of tenants for landlords, both with efficiency costs. Social segmentation reduces access to land for the rural poor, with high equity costs. Simulations suggest that improving tenure security would increase rental transactions by 21% and the area rented to the poor by 63%. Increased property rights security is hence beneficial not only to asset owners, but also to those with whom they might interact in the market.

Infected and Affected What the HIV/AIDS Epidemic Entails for Girls and Women in Africa

Human Immunodefi ciency Virus/Acquired Immuno defi ciency Syndrome (HIV/AIDS) has turned out to be particularly intricate for girls and women, in that they not only tend to be infected in greater numbers compared to males, but are also entrusted with the care of sick family members and orphans. The epidemic has caused mortality among young adults to soar, leaving a trail of destitution in the form of reduced income streams, food insecurity, insecure property rights and vulnerable livelihoods. Gender inequality in society, gender-based human rights abuses, poverty among women, violence, and lack of legal protection, among other things, increase the incidence of HIV/AIDS infection among females. The spread of infection can be curtailed by dismantling the factors that compel girls and women to engage in risky behaviour.

Rapacious Resource Depletion, Excessive Investment and Insecure Property Rights

For a country fractionalized in competing factions, each owning part of the stock of natural exhaustible resources, or with insecure property rights, we analyze how resources are transformed into productive capital to sustain consumption. We allow property rights to improve as the country transforms natural resources into capital. The ensuing power struggle about the control of resources is solved as a non-cooperative differential game. Prices of resources and depletion increase faster than suggested by the Hotelling rule, especially with many competing factions and less secure property rights. As a result, the country substitutes away from resources to capital too rapidly and invests more than predicted by the Hartwick rule. The power struggle boosts output but depresses aggregate consumption and welfare, especially in highly fractionalized countries with less secure property rights. The theory suggests that adjusted net saving estimates calculated by the World Bank using market prices over-estimate welfare-based measures of genuine saving.

Property rights protection, corporate transparency, and growth

In countries with secure property rights, corporate transparency improves investment efficiency and increases growth by alleviating information asymmetry. However, in countries with insecure property rights, greater transparency can increase the risk of government expropriation. Therefore, some firms that would benefit most from transparency cannot take full advantage of it, as they set sub-optimal transparency levels. Using data from 59 industries in 69 countries, we find that in countries with weak property rights protection, industries that would benefit the most from transparency exhibit worse investment efficiency and grow slower compared to industries that can efficiently operate at minimal levels of transparency.

Property Rights Protection, Corporate Transparency, and Growth

In countries with secure property rights, corporate transparency improves investment efficiency and increases growth by alleviating information asymmetry. However, in countries with insecure property rights, greater transparency can increase the risk of government expropriation. Therefore, some firms that would benefit most from transparency cannot take full advantage of it, as they set sub-optimal transparency levels. Using data from 59 industries in 69 countries, we find that in countries with weak property rights protection, industries that would benefit the most from transparency exhibit worse investment efficiency and grow slower compared to industries that can efficiently operate at minimal levels of transparency.