A Political Economy Application of the “Tragedy of the Anticommons”: The Greek Government Debt Crisis

Iván Major

International Advances in Economic Research, 2014, vol. 20, issue 4, 425-437

Abstract: The tragedy of the anticommons unfolds when separate social agents—be they private owners of a property who intend to use the property for their own economic benefit or political actors who pursue their political objectives—do not hold effective rights to use their economic or political power for their own purposes without consent of the other players of the economic or political game. I shall discuss the Greek government debt crisis and the Eurozone countries’ policies toward Greece within the analytical framework of the tragedy of the anticommons in this paper. I do not intend to dig deep into the structure and long-term trends of public and private finances in Greece. I shall only show that the successive bail-out programs of the Eurozone countries were doomed to fail because of these countries’ competitive and non-cooperative approach to the Greek financial problems. I shall also show that a coordinating agency, say the IMF, can foster the coordinated outcome only under strict informational conditions. Copyright International Atlantic Economic Society 2014

Keywords: Tragedy of the anticommons; Non-cooperative games; Eurozone; D00 Microeconomic theory; F01 Globalization; K00 Law and Economics; P60 Interdependence; Systems; Sustainability (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2014
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1007/s11294-014-9494-8 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:kap:iaecre:v:20:y:2014:i:4:p:425-437:10.1007/s11294-014-9494-8

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer.com/economics/journal/11294

DOI: 10.1007/s11294-014-9494-8

Access Statistics for this article

International Advances in Economic Research is currently edited by Katherine S. Virgo

More articles in International Advances in Economic Research from Springer, International Atlantic Economic Society Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().