Natural Property Rights: A Reply

A case of using property rights to manage natural resources

This article presents a case of using property rights to govern land use in the high country of New Zealand’s South Island. It tells the story of a land reform policy and its implementation over two decades, through changes in rules and governing parties. It observes land reform outcomes that are surprisingly favourable to pastoral leaseholders, and surprisingly unfavourable to the Crown. It th...

Property Rights, Collective Action, and Technologies for Natural Resource Management

Deg ra da tion of natu ral re sources has be come a global prob lem that threat ens the live li hood of mil lions of poor peo ple. Many prom is ing tech nolo gies for natu ral re source man age ment are avail able to ad dress these prob lems, but farm ers and oth ers of ten fail to adopt them. Why is this? Al though many fac tors can be iden ti fied, lack of se cure prop erty rights and col lec...

Natural resource use with limited-tenure property rights

We study the dynamic harvest incentives faced by a renewable resource harvester with insecure property rights. A resource ‘‘concession’’ is granted for a fixed duration, after which it is renewed (with a known probability) only if a target stock is achieved. Despite the insecurity of this property right, simple concessions contracts can be designed to induce first best harvest trajectories. We ...

Property rights, regulatory capture, and exploitation of natural resources∗

We study how the strength of property rights to individual extractive firms affects a regulator’s choice over exploitation rates for a natural resource. The regulator is modeled as an intermediary between current and future resource harvesters, rather than between producers and consumers, as in the traditional regulatory capture paradigm. When incumbent resource users have weak property rights,...

A Genetic-DEA Approach to Reveal Property Rights Priorities