Property rights need not be private—they can be communal or public (state)—but they need to be well-defined, secure, and transferable if they are to effectively internalize depletion costs. Where traditional, customary or communal rights exist, the best policy might be the recognition and strengthening of these rights rather than their supplantation with private property rights, especially if the latter is alien to the local culture.
Property rights are particularly applicable to land and soils (land rights), water resources (water rights), minerals (mining rights), and other natural resources which can be parceled out and enclosed or their boundaries easily demarcated and defended, as the ability to exclude non-owners is critical to the effectiveness of property rights as an economic instrument that induces rational resource use. Property rights are less applicable to situations where the resource is mobile or fugacious, i.e., it moves across boundaries (e.g., marine fisheries), or where significant externalities infringe on the content of the property rights, as when downstream land, water or a fishery resource are the receptors of upstream externalities (e.g., damage from floods or water pollution resulting from upstream deforestation or runoff of agrochemicals). In both these cases—a fugacious resource or significant externalities—the security and exclusivity of the property right is compromised and the right might no longer act as an incentive for efficient use and management; at the limit, the behavior of the “owner” resembles that of an exploiter of open-access resources who maximizes short-term capture and minimizes long-term investment. This behavior is also exhibited by farmers with only use rights or insecure land titles: they tend to “mine” rather than farm the land.
Finally, property rights (at least in their conventional form) are not a suitable instrument for environmental management where the resource itself or its use generates significant externalities, for example, a forest in an upstream watershed. In this case, property rights to the forest within the watershed would fail to internalize the environmental benefits of forest conservation (and environmental costs of forest harvest) to downstream activities. The result would be too little forest conservation and too much forest harvest from the society's point of view. If the externality was private, involving one or very few easily identified parties, the assignment of secure property rights to both upstream and downstream activities would have been sufficient to produce an efficient allocation, through either (a) bargaining between the parties involved or (b) unitization, that is, one party would buy out the other and unify the upstream and downstream activity under a single management (i.e., internalize the externality).
In the case of a public (widespread) externality with many sources and receptors, the bargaining between the parties is constrained by high transaction costs (information, negotiation, policing, etc.).
Unitization, which can be effected either through assignment of property rights to the entire river basin or to a single owner, could result in monopoly control (another market failure) even if the distributional considerations could be addressed. A consequence of the above limitations of property rights is their unsuitability for management of environmental resources such as air, water, atmosphere and the global climate.
However, as we will see below, it is still possible to use the advantages of property rights without their limitations in the protection of the environment and management of fugacious resources through innovative market creation (e.g., tradeable emission permits, tradeable catch
quotas, etc.).
As shown in Figure 2, property rights are of three main types: (a) ownership rights, such as land titles and water rights; (b) use rights, such as licenses, concession bidding, usufruct certificates, and access rights (e.g., to roads, parks, etc.); and (c) development rights as distinct from both ownership rights and use rights. Unattenuated, indefinite ownership is the purest form of property right while short-term use rights lie at the other extreme. For scarce resources with no significant externalities, unattenuated, private ownership rights are likely to result in the most efficient resource use and management (including long-term investment and conservation), provided private property is consistent with the social norms and traditions of the society concerned; otherwise, the private property owners would not feel fully secure or high enforcement costs would partially or fully offset the social gains from improved resource management. Divergence between the private and social discount rates also creates a wedge between private and social objectives but it does not, by itself, “invalidate” private ownership. As an economic instrument of efficient revenue allocation, it can be bridged either by eliminating the source of the divergence (economic and political uncertainty, highinterest rate policies, etc.) or by introducing supplementary economic or regulatory instruments (e.g., maximum allowable cut, tax on the rate of resource extraction, or subsidies for soil conservation).
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