Private Property and Economic Efficiency: A Study of a Common‐Pool Resource*

By Quentin Grafton, Dale Squires, Kevin J. Fox. Journal law and economy, 2000

360 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The British Columbia halibut fishery provides a natural experiment of the effects of “privatizing the commons.” Using firm‐level data from the fishery 2 years before private harvesting rights were introduced, the year they were implemented, and 3 years afterward, a stochastic frontier is estimated to test for changes in technical, allocative, and economic efficiency. The study indicates that (1) the short‐run efficiency gains from privatization may take several years to materialize and can be compromised by restrictions on transferability, duration, and divisibility of the property right; (2) substantial long‐run gains in efficiency can be jeopardized by preexisting regulations and the bundling of the property right to the capital stock; and (3) the gains from privatization are not just in terms of cost efficiency but include important benefits in revenue and product form.

Subfields: Economics and Econometrics, Management Science and Operations Research, Soil Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/72d1697c02cb631bc465c294a8b7e7319380916e

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Citations in the corpus

The elephant in the room: The hidden costs of leasing individual transferable fishing quotas (2009, neutral): “A 016/j.marpol.2009.02.004 esponding author.”
Adaptation to climate change in marine capture fisheries (2010, background): “and would include appropriately designed dedicated catch shares that can reduce harvesting costs and increase revenues [21] or gear restrictions that increase yield per recruit.”
Fishing Quota Markets (2005, background): “[20], which use firm-level data from the British Columbia”
Technical efficiency effects of input controls: evidence from Australia's banana prawn fishery (2004, methodology): “Channel fishing fleet, by Grafton et al. (2000) to evaluate”
Incentive-based Approaches to Sustainable Fisheries (2006, background): “After individual harvesting rights were introduced in BC’s halibut fishery, harvesters (through their industry association) set up and paid for dockside monitoring that tags every fish (Grafton et al. 2000).”
The triple bottom line: Meeting ecological, economic and social goals with individual transferable quotas (2012, methodology): “ITQs thus offer a decentralized method of allocating catch possibilities within fisheries which should promote efficient resource use [10,29].”
Property Rights in Fisheries: How Much Can Individual Transferable Quotas Accomplish? (2012, background): “It may be noted that static and dynamic allocative efficiency is essentially the same as what Grafton et al. (2000) refer to as technical and allocative efficiency in fishing.”
An intergenerational common pool resource experiment (2004, background): “[19] study British Columbia halibut fishery.”