EconPapers    
Economics at your fingertips  
 

Transferability of Collective Property Rights: Does Trade Destroy Trust?

Paul Seabright
Additional contact information
Paul Seabright: University of Cambridge

Chapter 4 in Property Relations, Incentives and Welfare, 1997, pp 94-115 from Palgrave Macmillan

Abstract: Abstract Many traditional systems of common property (such as forests, pastures and irrigation systems) have differed from modern systems of common property (such as firms) not just in the typically greater informality of the rules governing their management, but also in that it is less easy for the right to share in the duties and benefits of the common property resource to be transferred from one individual to another. The ownership of traditional systems has often been defined in terms of collective entities: a forest belongs to a given tribal group, or a pasture belongs to a particular village. The identities of the individuals who thereby qualify to exercise collective rights may change: some members of the tribe or the village may die or migrate, but it is often difficult and sometimes impossible for them simply to transfer their rights to somebody else. Not only do modern systems typically differ in this respect — for example, someone owning a share in a firm may transfer this share to a third party for a financial consideration — but it is a common ingredient of many structural policy reforms to seek to increase the ease with which such transfers are made. Whether it is the World Bank recommending the privatization of common land, or the financiers of the UK and the USA calling on countries such as Germany, France and Japan to remove some of the constraints limiting free trade in the shares of firms on their stock markets, such proposals are often viewed as facilitating the more efficient matching of owners to assets.

Keywords: High Effort; Collective Property; Effort Decision; Reputation Model; Implicit Contract (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 1997
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

There are no downloads for this item, see the EconPapers FAQ for hints about obtaining it.

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:pal:intecp:978-1-349-25287-9_4

Ordering information: This item can be ordered from
http://www.palgrave.com/9781349252879

DOI: 10.1007/978-1-349-25287-9_4

Access Statistics for this chapter

More chapters in International Economic Association Series from Palgrave Macmillan
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().

 
Page updated 2025-03-23
Handle: RePEc:pal:intecp:978-1-349-25287-9_4