the single european market and smes a comparison of its effects in the food and clothing sectors in the uk and portugal smallbone d cumbers a syrett s and leigh r 1999 the single european market and smes a comparison of its effects in the food and clothing sectors in the uk and portugal reg studies 33 51 62 the creation of a single european market in 1992 represented an attempt to accelerate the process of european economic integration however in terms of the actual impact of the single market process most of the attention so far has concentrated upon the implications for the large firm corporate sector in comparison there has been a lack of in depth analysis of the effects of the single market for small and medium sized enterprises smes despite the contribution to employment generation that is often prescribed for them in policy terms this paper seeks to stimulate a more informed debate about the consequences of the single market for smes by contrasting the effects on firms in different spatial and sectoral contexts drawing upon original survey evidence of smes in the food and clothing sectors in t

mean reversion in short horizon expected returns this article develops and estimates a simple model for monthly expected stock returns that relies on the rapidly decaying structure of shorter horizon weekly expected returns the most striking aspect of our findings is that the rapid mean reversion in short horizon expected returns implies much greater variation through time in monthly expected returns than has been documented in earlier studies for instance during the 1962 to 1985 period over 25 percent of the return variance of small firms can be explained by time variation in expected returns article published by oxford university press on behalf of the society for financial studies in its journal the review of financial studies

transferring williamson s discriminating alignment to the analysis of environmental governance of social ecological interdependence institutional fit is operationalized by transferring transaction costs economics tce to the analysis of instances of social ecological interdependence we carefully spell out the differences with conventional tce and outline analytical steps based on discriminating alignment that enable a tce analysis of environmental governance of nature related transactions we illustrate the approach through the example of wildlife management in germany here we find hierarchical governance a prohibition of killing of wolves embedded into a polycentric hybrid monitoring arrangement in applying tce to nature related transactions we argue that characteristics of nature related transactions can be subsumed under the core categories of jointness uncertainty asset specificity frequency rivalry excludability and social relational distance benefits of this approach include its generating a narrow list of descriptors of instances of biophysically mediated interdependence related to one evaluation criterion cost effectiveness the tce of nature related transactions thus identifies sets of stylized contextual factors and aspects related to the governance of hazards of ex post opportunistic behavior that cut across scales they can be used as composite descriptors that facilitate analysis of complex multi scalar arrangements of natural resource governance we propose the concept of governance challenge derived from tce as being useful for building research on environmental governance

information exchange in policy networks information exchange in policy networks is usually attributed to preference similarity influence reputation social trust and institutional actor roles we suggest that political opportunity structures and transaction costs play another crucial role and estimate a rich statistical network model on tie formation in the german toxic chemicals policy domain the results indicate that the effect of preference similarity is absorbed by institutional relational and social opportunity structures political actors choose contacts who minimize transaction costs while maximizing outreach and information we also find that different types of information exchange operate in complementary but not necessarily congruent ways

an endogenous growth model for the evolution of water rights systems this article presents a model to help explain the transition path from one water management system to another typically a commons framework to one of tradable permit based property rights furthermore drawing from transaction cost literature the model demonstrates how this takes place when externalities the strain on water resources become severe enough to warrant the increased transaction costs inherent with more complex water rights management frameworks

indigenous manufacturing enterprises in a peripheral economy and the single market the case of the republic of ireland foley a and griffith b 1992 indigenous manufacturing enterprises in a peripheral economy and the single market the case of the republic of ireland reg studies 26 375 386 the impact of the single market on indigenous irish owned manufacturing depends on its export domestic market orientation sectoral composition and size scale manufacturing in ireland has a dual structure the good features of manufacturing are mainly due to the branch plants of multinationals which have been attracted by inter alia tax incentives and grants these good features include high export to output ratios and a substantial presence in high technology sectors indigenous enterprises are small scale have low export propensities and have a limited presence in modern high technology sectors overall the impact of the single market on the long term development of indigenous enterprises is of less significance than the long standing weaknesses of scale product development technology and managerial capacity foley a

understanding the evolution and performance of water markets and allocation policy a transaction costs analysis framework abstract water markets and associated allocation policy reforms have struggled to achieve their intended goals in many water stressed rivers in part due to the institutional friction imposed by transition and transaction costs this paper elaborates a transaction costs analysis framework to examine the evolution and performance of water markets and allocation policy reforms this analysis rests on three pillars i a synthesis of three theoretical traditions of institutional analysis williamson north and ostrom often considered independently ii a framework to examine the types and interactions of transaction costs in market based water allocation over time and iii an illustrative analysis of three large river basins the colorado columbia and murray darling with varying levels of success in market based water policy reforms the resulting framework accounts for water s complexity as an economic good this framework and the case studies lead to the identification of several policy implications including the need for a multiphase sequencing of reform strategic investment in institutional transition costs and institutional choices that preserve future flexibility to adjust water rights and diversion limits to manage social and environmental externalities

persistence in international inflation rates we test for fractional dynamics in inflation rates based on the consumer price index cpi for 27 countries and inflation rates based on the wholesale price index wpi for 22 countries the fractional differencing parameter is estimated using semiparametric and approximate maximum likelihood methods significant evidence of fractional dynamics with long memory features is found in both cpi and wpi based inflation rates for industrial as well as developing countries implications of the findings are considered and sources of long memory are hypothesized

what is fractional integration a simple construction that will be referred to as an error duration model is shown to generate fractional integration and long memory an error duration representation also exists for many familiar arma models making error duration an alternative to autoregression for explaining dynamic persistence in economic variables the results lead to a straightforward procedure for simulating fractional integration and establish a connection between fractional integration and common notions of structural change two examples show how the error duration model could account for fractional integration in aggregate employment and in asset price volatility

a global survey and review of the determinants of transaction costs of forestry carbon projects reducing carbon emissions in the forestry sector by means of market based schemes is considered a cost effective measure for tackling climate change impacts however the transaction costs tcs involved are typically unknown or unquantified and therefore often neglected in this study three types of tcs search design and negotiation costs were measured in person days and monetary terms based on a global survey of forestry carbon projects implemented across latin america asia and africa cost estimates vary between zero and 1 201 tco2 for person days and from zero to us 1 738 tco2 for monetary costs key drivers of tcs are identified based on the characteristics of the project in general the transaction the transactors involved and institutional design the latter type of characteristic is shown to have a particularly large impact on tcs

institutions and environmental governance a reconceptualization abstract this article presents the conceptual revisions needed to extend the new institutional approach to environmental governance from its current local and international domains of application to all governance solutions including national environmental and natural resource use policies and multi level governance solutions that are increasingly used to address global environmental change the article suggests that environmental governance is best understood as the establishment reaffirmation or change of institutions to resolve conflicts over environmental resources it also explains why the choice of these institutions is a matter of social justice rather than of efficiency the article suggests a way to understand formal and state centered governance solutions as forms of collective ownership not unlike common property the article demonstrates how institutional analysis can gain resolution by looking at the functional and structural tiers organization of governance functions and formulation of key institutional rules as key aspects of the design of governance institutions

further long memory properties of inflationary shocks several previous studies have found fractionally integrated or long memory behavior in the conditional mean of inflation this paper notes that extremely similar phenomena are also apparent in the squared and absolute values of residuals from fractionally filtered inflation series hence the inflation process appears to have a dual long memory feature in both its first and its second conditional moments we suggest a parametric model of long memory in both the conditional mean and the conditional variance some monte carlo evidence is presented that supports estimation of the model by approximate maximum likelihood methods we then report estimated models for the inflation series for several different industrialized countries including the united states for nearly all of the countries in our study there is strong evidence of statistically significant long memory parameters in both the conditional mean and the variance we note some of the implications for modeling inflation

polycentricity reciprocity and farmer adoption of conservation practices under community based governance abstract significant steps have occurred under australia s regional delivery model towards devolving responsibilities for natural resource management nrm to community based regional bodies particularly in respect of motivating farmers to adopt priority conservation practices challenges remain in effectively engaging the large populations covered by these bodies especially with these bodies expected to assume responsibilities that risk them becoming perceived as extensions of government and favoring particular stakeholders in this article i examine whether polycentric systems of collaborative community based governance can help address these challenges the examination involves double censored regression analyses of data from postal surveys of farmers in three regions the findings suggest that community based approaches are capable under the regional delivery model of motivating greater voluntary cooperation from farmers than otherwise possible they highlight the importance of farmers coming to adopt reciprocity strategies in their key institutional relationships under this model it seems subregional bodies have an advantage over regional bodies in motivating such behavior from farmers because the former are better positioned to engage them sufficiently to turn around norms of free riding or opposition entrenched by earlier paternalistic approaches to agri environmental conservation this indicates the value of a polycentric approach to community based nrm wherein responsibilities are devolved to the lowest possible governance level consistent with the principle of subsidiarity the economic dividend from increased voluntary adoption of conservation practices under this approach arises from the reduced transaction political and other opportunity costs of achieving the same result entirely through coercion or financial inducements

forest owner perceptions of institutions and voluntary contracting for biodiversity conservation not crowding out but staying out although the concepts of institutions in economics and institutional analysis have been integrated in recent writings about payments for ecosystem services pes their joint operationalization and testing have been limited to tackle this integration challenge we empirically explore how finnish non industrial private forest owners perceptions about voluntary biodiversity conservation contracting correspond with the institutional theories about pes further we test whether the perceptions are related to pes contracting in the past or in the future the results of the explorative factor analyses corresponded with the theoretical considerations of both economics and institutional analysis the logistic regression analyses showed that the factors that related to past contracting differed notably from those that explained future intentions to contract most consistently perceptions about positive ecological impacts were positively related to past contracting while social and moral normative perceptions had a negative effect in other words those who would conserve nature for altruistic reasons tended not to have entered a contract but rather stayed out local and social welfare expectations increased the willingness to contract in the future our analysis highlights the importance of normative conservation justifications as well as the expectations regarding non economic benefits and welfare impacts for pes design and analysis

talk is cheap or is it the cost of consulting about uncertain reallocation of water in the murray darling basin australia abstract in this paper we reflect on the challenge of reallocating water resources from agricultural interests to environmental uses the area of interest is the murray darling basin australia although the evidence presented provides salient lessons for a range of settings we draw on the transaction cost literature where the tasks of re designing and using institutions can help conceptualise the costs associated with policy change a framework for improving ex ante assessment of transaction costs and its relationship to transformation or abatement costs is elaborated especially as it relates to community consultation exercises against the background of the water reforms of the past three decades we conclude that policy makers and administrators could limit increases in transformation costs and contain transaction costs by giving greater attention to the form of community consultation by taking account of the sources of uncertainty that attend policy choices and recognising the potential for consultation fatigue

transactions costs of expanding nutrient trading to agricultural working lands a virginia case study abstract agricultural nonpoint sources nps figure prominently in the design of many water quality trading programs in concept water quality trading programs can create incentives for agricultural operators to supply low cost pollutant reductions while still keeping land in agricultural production in practice water quality trading programs in the united states have produced few trades involving agricultural nps transactions costs are a critical but poorly understood feature of water quality trading programs the objective of this study is to examine the transactions costs associated with expanding the use of nps credits in a water quality trading program in virginia united states to include credits generated from agricultural working lands best management practices bmps findings indicate that transactions costs for agricultural nps trades in virginia are currently relatively low due to the activity being credited simple land conversion based on best available evidence transactions costs of creating credits using management and structural bmps will be 2 to 16 times more costly on a per project basis than for land conversion credits compliance monitoring protocols are a significant driver of costs for working lands credits our results suggest an important cost risk tradeoff between verification costs and compliance certainty for program designers to consider

uncovering the us term premium an alternative route abstract the estimates of the us term premium crucially depend upon the ex ante decision on whether the short term rate is either an i 0 or an i 1 process in this paper we estimate a fractionally integrated i d model which simultaneously determines both the order of integration of the short term rate and the associated term premium we show that the term premium experienced a sharp increase from essentially zero in mid 2007 to almost 3 in 2009 we also show that unemployment and term premium dynamics exhibit a very significant positive co movement

evidence on the extent and potential sources of long memory in u s treasury security returns and yields unlike equity returns many fixed income return measures appear to display long memory we show that the extent of long memory differs strongly for gross and excess holding period returns on u s treasury securities granger and others have argued that long memory may only reflect infrequent structural breaks we explore the impact of structural instability on tests for long memory and find only weak indications that it lies behind the long memory in our return series the evidence of long memory remains strong for yield and term premia series even after accounting for a series of potential underlying structural changes

transaction costs of carbon offset projects a comparative study abstract the land use change and forestry sector can be a cost effective contributor to climate mitigation in at least three ways providing carbon offsets through carbon sequestration in biomass and soils reducing emissions of methane and other greenhouse gases and producing biofuels that replace fossil fuels the presence of carbon markets should help encourage these activities however most carbon trades to date have occurred in the energy sector a major obstacle to carbon trades from land use systems is the presence of high transaction costs of converting a carbon offset into a tradable commodity so the prevailing market carbon prices may not provide enough incentive for adoption this paper presents a model of the exchange of carbon offsets between a project developer and a group of landholders the model is solved to derive project feasibility frontiers that show the minimum number of contracts necessary to make a project feasible at any given carbon price the model is applied to two case studies smallholder agroforestry in indonesia and partial reforestation of family farms in australia under two types of contract purchase of carbon flows and rental of carbon stocks the paper concludes by identifying possible strategies to reduce transaction costs while maintaining project integrity

the scope for collective action in a large groundwater basin an institutional analysis of aquifer governance in western australia the gnangara groundwater system in western australia supports multiple ecological systems and human uses and is under unprecedented stress this paper examines some of ostrom s situational variables for the analysis of institutional choice in common pool resources as they relate to the gnangara case the institutional analysis identifies elements of the current governance institutions that could be altered to facilitate collective action we use data from a set of water licensing documents obtained from the state s department of water a number of factors are identified as inhibiting the potential for collective action current arrangements are top down in nature with all rules monitoring and any enforcement supplied by the state level management agency norms and expectations among appropriators appear to be competitive rather than co operative and discount rates appear to be high monitoring and enforcement are under supplied and opportunistic behaviour affects compliance the interactions between user and regulator influence the appropriation of flows and have resulting impacts on the resource stock we conclude that several factors in this case prejudice the development of collective action institutions by appropriator efforts alone the study highlights important aspects of the institutional arrangements in place and their likely effects upon the attitudes and behaviours of appropriators who along with wildlife and ecosystems depend on the common pool resource

transaction costs and institutional performance in market based environmental water allocation policy reforms in the columbia basin spurred water rights reallocation for ecological recovery transaction costs have caused implementation to lag this paper examines transaction costs and institutional performance in environmental water allocation it evaluates spatial and temporal performance trends in watershed cases along three dimensions of adaptive efficiency water recovery transaction costs and program budgets performance trends demonstrate intrastate variability and volatility over time due to the importance of local institutional capacity which is uneven within states higher levels of water recovery may coincide with moderate to high transaction costs and program budgets particularly during initial implementation efforts this finding reflects investments in multilevel policy reform to strengthen enabling conditions and adapt to unintended consequences jel q25 q58

who talks with whom the role of repeated interactions in decentralized forest governance summary this article suggests that efforts to study decentralization outcomes would benefit from widening the unit of analysis from the local government administration to the local governance system many individual local governments especially in developing countries lack the human and physical resources to be effective governors by themselves it is thus useful to recognize the linkages between different governance actors the empirical analysis based on observations in bolivia s forestry sector finds that the degree of connectivity between the actors in a municipal governance system helps explain why some systems are more effective than others 2003 elsevier ltd all rights reserved

long memory in foreign exchange rates using the geweke porter hudak test we find evidence of long memory in exchange rate data this implies that the empirical evidence of unit roots in exchange rates may not be robust to long memory alternatives fractionally integrated autoregressive moving average arfima models are estimated by both the time domain exact maximum likelihood ml method and the frequency domain approximate ml method impulse response functions and forecasts based on these estimated arfima models are evaluated to gain insight into the long memory characteristics of exchange rates some tentative explanations of the long memory found in the exchange rates are discussed

why do transaction costs of agricultural policies vary policy related transaction costs tcs is an important issue when evaluating different policy options however tcs are often not taken into account in policy evaluations but may be as important for efficiency as the direct production costs different policies may result in different tcs and the main aim of this article is to explore possible reasons for these differences we compare the level of tcs for 12 different agricultural policy measures in norway and we analyze the causes of the differences along three different dimensions asset specificity frequency and point of policy application at the national level we find that all three dimensions are of importance when explaining the differences while variation in tcs incurred by farmers are mainly due to differences in point of policy application and asset specificity data show that direct price support has the lowest tcs while more direct payments for environmental amenities has the highest

transaction costs and environmental policy design abstract this article synthesizes the growing empirical literature on transaction costs to identify pragmatic design recommendations for environmental and natural resource policies the new institutional economics literature recognizes that appropriate policy choice and design will be a function of the specific characteristics of the problem the physical and institutional determinants of both transaction costs and abatement costs should be considered in the policy design process due to potential interactions between them analysts also need to incorporate the extent to which the technologies institutional environment governance structures or policy designs can be changed some factors can only be adjusted to or designed around while others can be designed differently this framework highlights the importance of property rights since transaction costs will be incurred to obtain or retain property rights and since the rights assignment may affect both the magnitudes and distribution of costs another implication is that education and extension programs or use of behavioral economics concepts to affect choices can be cost effective in some circumstances policy design should take advantage of economies of scale and foster technical change appropriate sequencing of policy instruments may decrease transaction costs particularly if there is potential for technical change

analysing inflation by the fractionally integrated arfima garch model this paper considers the application of long memory processes to describing inflation for ten countries we implement a new procedure to obtain approximate maximum likelihood estimates of an arfima garch process which is fractionally integrated i d with a superimposed stationary arma component in its conditional mean additionally this long memory process is allowed to have garch type conditional heteroscedasticity on analysing monthly post world war ii cpi inflation for ten different countries we find strong evidence of long memory with mean reverting behaviour for all countries except japan which appears stationary for three high inflation economies there is evidence that the mean and volatility of inflation interact in a way that is consistent with the friedman hypothesis

first movers non movers and social gains from subsidising entry in markets for nature based recreational goods abstract the importance of ecosystem services for mankind stresses the issue of identifying different institutional solutions to effectively secure their adequate provision much focus has been on services of the public good type and instruments like payments for environmental services we extend this work to consider the possible social gains from supporting development of new markets for nature based recreational goods which may alleviate negative externalities caused by congestion problems our three main questions are i why is there a lack of market development ii can there be social gains from intervention and supporting the development of such markets and iii if so then how could such intervention be best performed we use a two stage non cooperative bayesian simultaneous move game model and show that in spite of apparent potential first mover advantages in a developing market demand uncertainty and sunk costs may equally well result in widespread presence of non movers on the supplier side we show that social gains can be made from offering a subsidy towards the sunk costs analysing three possible subsidy schemes we show a that fixed costs may make rationing optimal b that sequential rationing does not necessarily dominate strict rationing because c the more subsidies are offered the larger each subsidy must be to induce participation and that d the longer a single agent on the market may keep market information to himself the better a non rationing scheme will perform relative to rationing schemes finally e subsidies for second mover entry may be optimal in some cases

transnational markets for sustainable development governance the case of redd summary transnational sustainable development that is sustainable development policy initiatives involving actors in multiple countries often involves donor sponsorship of sustainable development projects similar to matching markets like venture capital employment searches or college admissions these transaction systems also known as matching markets can be seen in a variety of phenomena in transnational development governance including private aid public private sustainable development projects and transnational polycentric governance initiatives in this paper we utilize the matching market framework to develop a new approach to addressing an important question in development studies how do donors understood as donor agencies funds and foundations and firms choose which projects to support beginning with the observation that matching markets in sustainable development governance are heavily constrained by transaction costs in the absence of formal institutions that lower costs of searching monitoring and communicating with potential partners we hypothesize that both donors and project participants are motivated to utilize strategies to lower transaction costs of making connections which results in selection of projects based on the presence of transnational brokers or familiar partners or as part of a strategy of spatial specialization conceptualizing the choices made in this matching market as an affiliation network connecting donors to sponsored projects we utilize exponential random graph models of 91 funders support of 195 reducing emissions from deforestation redd and sustainable forest management pilot projects undertaken between 1989 and june 2012 to test the effects of transaction costs on donors choices of projects to sponsor we find that brokerage prior collaboration with the donor in question and spatial specialization all contribute to the ability of project proponents to attract funder support often outperforming relevant project characteristics such as carbon density and accessibility these findings suggest tensions between local scale project implementation and the transnational search for resource support observed qualitatively in the development studies literature can have significant effects on the overall structure of transnational collaboration on sustainable development

valuing nature lessons learned and future research directions this paper critically reviews the literature on environmental valuation of ecosystem services across the range of global biomes the main objective of this review is to assess the policy relevance of the information encompassed by the wide range of valuation studies that have been undertaken so far published and other studies now cover most ecosystems with aquatic and marine contexts attracting the least attention there is also a predominance of single function valuation studies studies valuing multiple functions and uses and studies which seek to capture the before and after states as environmental changes take place are rare by and large it is the latter types of analyses that are most important as aids to more rational decision taking in ecosystem conservation versus development situations involving different stakeholders local national and global aggregate global scale estimates of ecosystems value are problematic given the fact that only marginal values are consistent with conventional decision aiding tools such as economic cost benefit analysis in general valuation data provide prima facie support for the hypothesis that net ecosystem service value diminishes with biodiversity and ecosystem loss balmford et al 2002 science 297 p 950 future research effort should include complementary research on multiple ecosystem services that seeks to capture the temporal disturbance profile and its causal factors the explicit recognition of multiple interdependent ecosystem services and values poses both conceptual and empirical research challenges it would serve to transform the practice of research in this sub field via the a priori assumption of multiple and inter dependent use instead of independent single use this line of reasoning can then be extended to the institutional arrangements that determine which values are captured new institutional processes and arrangements are probably required in order to best realise benefit streams from multiple ecosystem use and non use provision across a range of different stakeholders

factors that influence transaction costs in development offsets who bears what and why abstract environmental policy instruments generate transaction costs to public and private parties there is a growing literature reporting on the size of transaction costs produced by environmental policy instruments this paper extends that literature through an analysis of the factors that influence transaction costs in environmental policy and how this influence occurs the theory based factors that influence transaction costs are categorised as 1 transaction characteristics 2 transactor characteristics 3 nature of the institutional environment and 4 nature of the institutional arrangements we examined how these factors influenced transaction costs through the analysis of two australian based development offset schemes with different policy designs we found evidence of all four theory based categories of influence in the policy case studies the degree of influence and how each factor influenced transaction costs varies across the two policies and between parties policy design as a component of the institutional environment had a particularly large bearing on transaction costs of offset buyers and the policy administrator an important contribution to transaction cost theory assumes the institutional environment as given

long memory in inflation rates international evidence we examine monthly inflation rates of five industrial countries the application of tests against stationarity as well as tests against a unit root yield contradictory results thus fractional integration allowing for long memory is a plausible model we discuss and apply the periodogram regression to estimate the difference parameters for all countries we find estimates significantly different from 1 as well as from 0 this is evidence in favor of long memory specification tests and maximum likelihood estimates support the fitted models finally we relate our empirical results to the construction of the data

from ecological macroeconomics to a theory of endogenous money for a finite planet abstract this paper takes stock of the achievements and gaps of the emerging field of ecological macroeconomics which has brought insights from specific schools of macroeconomics most notably post keynesian to ecological economics with a strong emphasis on the endogeneity of money ecological macroeconomics has proposed fiscal monetary and prudential reforms to boost green investments and developed new modeling frameworks to explore the interactions between the financial macroeconomic and biophysical spheres while these proposals open a broader range of possibilities to engage in a socio ecological transition than those offered by the current paradigm of a financialized global economy they paradoxically suffer from similar limitations by placing much faith in green investments they impose a vision of the transition that presents strong technical and institutional limitations the field also fails to revisit its own understanding of macroeconomics and of specific phenomena e g financial instability through a biophysical lens in spite of increasing transdisciplinary evidence supporting this approach we suggest overcoming these limitations through institutionalist perspectives that understand money as a language through which value is created and legitimized those perspectives seem essential to re embed the governance of money within a worldview that acknowledges the finiteness and incommensurable values of earth s life support systems

watershed partnerships and the emergence of collective action institutions this paper examines the emergence of local cooperative institutions watershed partnerships that resolve collective action problems involved in the management of natural resources the political contracting approach to institutional supply suggests that watershed partnerships are more likely to emerge when potential benefits outweigh the transaction costs of developing and maintaining new institutions we analyze the impact of social political economic and ecological features of watersheds that affect benefits and transaction costs on the emergence of 958 watershed partnerships in the more than 2 100 watersheds in the united states our findings demonstrate that watershed partnerships are most likely to emerge in watersheds confronting severe pollution problems associated with agricultural and urban runoff with low levels of command and control enforcement and containing the resources to offset transaction costs

choices without prices without apologies valuing is usually regarded as a process of compressing information about attributes into a single metric armed with this reduced form of compact information the consumer can consider a particular object with a particular price attached or implied and make an informed decision but the process of valuing is less straightforward than we ordinarily suppose when environmental goods and services become the object of information compaction it is possible that important information is lost we comment on the choice problem germane to environmental goods and services and challenge the presumption that environmental choices made without explicit pricing are inferior to those in which hypothetical valuation studies are undertaken

public benefits private benefits and policy mechanism choice for land use change for environmental benefits the choice of policy mechanisms for encouraging environmentally beneficial land use change should depend on the relative levels of private or internal net benefits and public or external net benefits a map of recommended policy mechanisms is developed depending on the relative levels of these variables positive incentives negative incentives and extension need to be targeted carefully to appropriate projects where private net benefits are closer to zero and or public net benefits are more extremely positive or negative technology development is suggested where private net costs outweigh public net benefits no action is recommended for many potential projects

an institutional analysis of payments for environmental services abstract in this paper the characteristics and functioning of pes is analyzed from an institutional perspective while in theory pes is seen as a market solution to environmental problems as an alternative to state hierarchical and community governance a review of a large amount of case studies shows that pes in practice depends rather fundamentally on state and or community engagement hence pes are foremost a reconfiguration of the roles of public bodies and communities becoming core intermediaries or buyers first to establish pes rights to the land that delivers the environmental service must be clarified this demands public action second transacting over environmental amenities is very costly creating markets for environmental services depends therefore crucially on state and community facilitation hence buyers are often public agencies high transaction costs also influence price setting payments do not follow the market format as intermediaries frequently are setting the price with users often being unaware even of the fact that they pay finally the distinction between payments as incentives and as fair compensations is emphasized while payments may strengthen community relations and simplify action for environmental care they may also introduce a purely instrumental logic and in some cases worsen the environmental status by crowding out environmental virtues for the future greater awareness of these dynamics is warranted

the economics of organization the transaction cost approach the transaction cost approach to the study of economic organization regards the transaction as the basic unit of analysis and holds that an understanding of transaction cost economizing is central to the study of organizations applications of this approach require that transactions be dimensionalized and that alternative governance structures be described economizing is accomplished by assigning transactions to governance structures in a discriminating way the approach applies both to the determination of efficient boundaries as between firms and markets and to the organization of internal transactions including the design of employment relations the approach is compared and contrasted with selected parts of the organization theory literature

the political transaction costs and uncertainties of establishing environmental rights abstract the significance of transaction costs for the analysis of environmental policy is increasingly recognized this article focuses on one aspect of the topic the political uncertainty and transaction costs of establishing environmental rights our contribution is to model the political process around the rights establishment and to monetize the associated welfare costs the model includes both policy related and political institutional parameters including the extent to which environmental rights are shared with polluters the environmental benefits of the policy the policy s abatement costs and the relative political power of polluters and environmentalists the model is solved to give unique nash equilibria for the transaction costs of lobbying and for the probability of the policy s political success these results are then used to show the degree to which political actions can dissipate the expected economic surplus from environmental policymaking

institutional ecological economics abstract new institutional economics and its forerunners have we argue made important contributions to the evolving agenda of ecological economics the conceptualisation of environmental problems as instances of interdependence and the acknowledgement of positive transaction costs are key insights into the nature of environmental problems we also discuss how plurality of behavioural motivations and limited cognitive capacity have important implications for environmental decision making and its analysis we show how evolutionary and collective action theories offer complementary takes on the choice and change of environmental governance institutions and how the concept of social capital can enrich analyses of environmental governance we conclude that an emerging institutional ecological economics has the greatest relative advantage in analysing the design implementation and effectiveness of environmental governance solutions

the build up of local sustainable development politics a case study of company leaders in france abstract the purpose of this study is to examine business leaders perceptions on sustainable development and their expectations about local governments using a questionnaire on a cross section of 32 french business leaders we examine the following questions can issues related to sustainable development extend beyond questions of profit and future economic dynamism the modern global economic crisis in combination with the ongoing ecological one makes regional attractiveness more topical than ever if local governments invest in sustainable development policy it might satisfy not only citizens but also firms in the territory while attracting new ones as well to determine if firms are really interested in such a policy as well as understand their expectations this research undertook interviews with 32 business leaders we found that local governments should act with firms as partners to increase resilience and sustainability the expectations of business leaders and their sensitivity to sustainable development suggest that sustainable development policies could improve the attractiveness of a local economy especially in the context of the current environmental and economic crises

provided and perceived status quo in choice experiments implications for valuing the outputs of multifunctional rural areas this article presents a choice experiment analyzing multifunctional rural development policies targeting conservation and recovery of environmental social and cultural assets in choice experiments a base alternative is usually included in order to estimate the welfare change associated to policy proposals this study is concerned with the much neglected issue of the impact on policy analysis of the definition of a status quo alternative either as an objective assessment by experts or as a self reported perception by respondents convergent validity analysis and prospective policy scenarios show a significant impact of different status quo specifications on individuals preferences and related welfare measures when complex and unfamiliar biophysical systems are involved in policy analysis and evaluation

examining the conventions of voluntary environmental approaches in french agriculture in this paper we consider how growing awareness of environmental problems in agriculture has triggered certain interactions between producers and consumers since both public and private actors resort to collective action to address these problems this article will seek to examine the different forms of economic coordination and their dynamics using an adaptation of salais and storper s worlds of production framework 1992 1997 considering that each world of production is a world of conventions we focus on environmental conventions this work is based on an empirical study of agricultural voluntary environmental approaches as these provide a means of ensuring coordination between producers and consumers and enable products to be differentiated according to their environmental quality copyright oxford university press

what determines urban households willingness to pay for co2 emission reductions in turkey a contingent valuation survey abstract this paper explores turkish urban households willingness to pay wtp for co2 emission reductions expected to result from improvements in power production a face to face questionnaire with a contingent valuation cv module prepared using the double bounded dichotomous choice elicitation framework was administered to 2422 respondents representative of urban turkey a developing country with low but rapidly increasing greenhouse gas emissions the determinants of wtp were identified by considering not only the impact of standard socio economic factors but also the effects of environmental knowledge attitudes and behaviour the relevance of the identity of the collection agent national versus international institutions in terms of trust people have towards them and the degree of perceived participation of others in the realization of the project our study confirms the existing literature in demonstrating that wtp figures reported by young and educated people that are active on environmental issues and who also possess material security and environmental knowledge are more likely to be high however their willingness to make contributions is hampered significantly by their belief that their fellow citizens will not contribute and the general lack of trust in institutions overall this study may be taken as a call to eliminate governance related uncertainties in climate change deals

level shifts and the illusion of long memory in economic time series when applied to time series processes containing occasional level shifts the log periodogram gph estimator often erroneously finds long memory for a stationary short memory process with a slowly varying level i show that the gph estimator is substantially biased and derive an approximation to this bias the asymptotic bias lies on the 0 1 interval and its exact value depends on the ratio of the expected number of level shifts to a user defined bandwidth parameter using this result i formulate the modified gph estimator which has a markedly lower bias i illustrate this new estimator via applications to soybean prices and stock market volatility

improving environmental decisions a transaction costs story abstract a multidisciplinary team of researchers made efforts to influence the design and implementation of environmental policy in australia a focus of these efforts was the development of the investment framework for environmental resources inffer in addition the team undertook a range of communication activities training user support and participation in committees and enquiries transaction costs were relevant to these efforts in a variety of ways environmental managers perceived inffer to involve relatively high transaction costs a balance was struck between the system having simplicity and low transaction costs and delivering environmental benefits transaction costs were factored into the planning and prioritisation processes developed for example public and private transaction costs are accounted for in the calculation of benefit cost ratios and in the choice of policy mechanisms there are diverse roles that transaction costs play in the processes of developing implementing and influencing environmental policy programmes a key observation is that appropriate strategic investment in transaction costs can improve decisions and increase net benefits from an environmental programme a well designed decision process can involve incurring transaction costs at one stage in order to save transaction costs at a later stage

short rate nonlinearities and regime switches abstract using non parametric estimation methods various authors have shown distinct non linearities in the drift and volatility function of the us short rate which are inconsistent with standard affine term structure models we document how a regime switching model with state dependent transition probabilities between regimes can replicate the patterns found by the non parametric studies to do so we use data from the uk and germany in addition to us data and include term spreads in some of our models we also examine the drift and volatility function of the term spread

property rights regimes and natural resources a conceptual analysis the term common property resource is an example of a term repeatedly used to refer to property owned by a government or by no one it is also used for property owned by a community of resource users such usage leads to confusion in scientific study and policy analysis in this paper we develop a conceptual schema for arraying property rights regimes that distinguishes among diverse bundles of rights ranging from authorized user to claimant to proprietor and to owner we apply this conceptual schema to analyze findings from a variety of empirical settings including the maine lobster industry

common property and collective action in economic development abstract a fundamental issue in many ldcs is the degree to which natural resource mismanagement is caused by common property arrangements this view has led to widespread attempts to privatize forests rangelands and water resources many of these efforts have failed to stop overuse and have contributed to inequality in resource distribution this paper seriously questions this approach and describes a number of reasons why common property may continue to be both efficient and equitable complementing and combining with private rights in a way consistent with the resource endowments of village economies a theoretical approach is outlined showing that the tragedy of the commons is an unsatisfactory model of common property an alternative model is presented together with a call for research into institutional alternatives in resource management

rhetoric and reality in protected area governance institutional change under different conservation discourses in mount elgon national park uganda abstract the approach to governance of protected areas has been in transition over last decades partly driven by evolving policy discourses that shape the ways in which conservation is thought to be delivered the most influential discourses are the fortress approach community conservation and back to the barriers how different discourses translate and are instituted on ground are however complex and disputed inclusive policy strategies in relation to local involvement in developing countries are of particular concern the study analyses how conservation policy discourses have become manifested taking the case of mount elgon national park menp uganda it outlines main conservation policy discourses analyses actor s interests and power relations and further examines how institutions for park governance have evolved and changed according to the different discourses the results indicate that conservation discourses and donor support come and go while menp seems to outlast all the worrying reality is that menp administration strongly influenced by the interplay of path dependent institutional forces rooted in the fortress discourse simply sticks to its guns maintaining the application of law enforcement as key management instruments in its approach to governance especially to local people interactions there is an apparent gap between rhetoric and reality in protected area governance

collaboration patterns external shocks and uncertainty swiss nuclear energy politics before and after fukushima abstract energy shocks like the fukushima accident can have important political consequences this article examines their impact on collaboration patterns between collective actors in policy processes it argues that external shocks create both behavioral uncertainty meaning that actors do not know about other actors preferences and policy uncertainty on the choice and consequences of policy instruments the context of uncertainty interacts with classical drivers of actor collaboration in policy processes the analysis is based on a dataset comprising interview and survey data on political actors in two subsequent policy processes in switzerland and exponential random graph models for network data results first show that under uncertainty collaboration of actors in policy processes is less based on similar preferences than in stable contexts but trust and knowledge of other actors are more important second under uncertainty scientific actors are not preferred collaboration partners

transaction costs of alternative greenhouse gas policies in the australian transport energy sector abstract this study employs a comparative analysis of the transaction costs of alternative policy instruments the institutional approach to the allocation of resources is emerging to supplement traditional analyses of market and government failures the causes of these failures are many but often point to high transaction costs that result largely from institutional impediments effective institutions can help reduce transaction costs through more effective signals and incentives including information generation to help markets function more efficiently and policies to be delivered more successfully the study which contributes to transaction costs measurement finds that the magnitudes and types of transaction costs associated with setting up and implementing three greenhouse gas reduction policy programs in australia are substantial and different the estimated transaction costs of the tradable permit and fee system are relatively high compared to those of the mandatory fuel label program and the voluntary fuel efficiency program which supports the view that market based policies can also be costly to deliver notwithstanding transaction costs have frequently been ignored in cost benefit analyses it is concluded that transaction costs need to be considered alongside other costs and benefits in the assessment of policies

transaction costs collective action and adaptation in managing complex social ecological systems abstract with the escalating uncertainties and surprises faced in responding to environmental and natural resource challenges has come growing recognition of the need to manage such issues as social ecological systems and value the capacities that enable adaptation to these changes adaptations in environmental management often involve complex including wicked problems of collective action institutions introduced to reduce the transaction costs of solving these problems do not come for free a cost effectiveness framework designed to provide a comprehensive and logical structure for economic evaluation of path dependent institutional choices in this context and a procedure for boundedly rational empirical application of the framework are proposed and illustrated in this article including for the choice between water buy back and infrastructure upgrade programmes for accumulating the environmental water needed to sustain the ecosystems of australia s murray darling basin also outlined is a research strategy designed to help identify the heuristics needed for application of this procedure

the management of common property resources collective action as an alternative to privatisation or state regulation can locally based collective action be a viable way to manage common property resources many writers on collective action and common property are sweepingly pessimistic about the ability of the people who face problems of common property to organize sustainable patterns of use for themselves this paper shows with reference to prisoners dilemma garett hardin s tragedy of the commons and mancur olson s logic of collective action that the analytical basis for this pessimism is weak in many situations of village based common property resource use there can thus be no general presumption that the collective action route to common property resource management will fail any more than there can be a general presumption that it will work the paper suggests a number of general factors to do with the characteristics of the resources the user group and group state relations on which chances of success depend

prospects for a heterodox economics of the environment and sustainability this paper introduces a special issue on heterodox economics of the environment and sustainability at present humanity faces several challenges such as resource scarcity biodiversity loss and climate change and yet we would argue contributions from traditional heterodox schools of thought such as post keynesianism marxism and to a lesser extent institutionalism have had relatively little to say about them instead the economic analysis of environmental issues has been dominated by approaches inspired by neoclassical economics and latterly by ecological economics the special issue is part of an effort to stimulate more heterodox work on the environment and to explore connections between existing groups of scholars particularly between ecological and heterodox economists

transaction costs risk aversion and the choice of contractual arrangements publisher summary this chapter discusses transaction costs risk aversion and the choice of contractual arrangements every transaction involves a contract and the transactions conducted in the marketplace entail outright or partial transfers of property rights among individual contracting parties the contractual arrangements through which these transfers are negotiated are several and varied the chapter presents a theory that states that economic efficiency is the same under various land tenure arrangements subject to the constraint of private property rights although transaction costs exist in the real world the theory enables the understanding of much of the farming behavior however the presence of a variety of contractual arrangements under the same constraint of competition poses the question of the choice of these arrangements if a firm can increase efficiency in production by employing productive resources of more than one resource owner a contract to combine the resources will be obtained the formation of the contract involves partial transfers of property rights in one form or another such as leasing hiring or mortgaging

transaction costs power and multi level forest governance in indonesia since 2005 there has been considerable international interest in reducing emissions from deforestation and forest degradation redd a program intended to finance protection of tropical forests through the sale of carbon offsets or from donor funding requiring the collaboration of local and international civil society stakeholders firms and donor and host governments redd is inherently a multi level governance project but to date participation in redd and coordination across governmental levels have been weak combining literature on multi level and polycentric governance of socioecological systems with transaction cost economics we argue that transaction costs structure cross level information sharing and collaboration relationships among organizations engaged in redd policy development at the national and provincial levels in indonesia using an exponential random graph modelling approach with data collected from interviews with over 80 organizations between 2010 and 2012 we find that powerful organizations tend to dominate cross level connections though this effect is somewhat mediated by organizational similarity which reduces transaction costs we suggest that explicit efforts to help local organizations overcome the transaction costs of building cross level relationships will be a central component of building an effective and equitable multi level governance system for redd in indonesia

a framework for evaluating collective action and informal institutional dynamics under a resource management policy of decentralization the decentralization of resource property rights has become an increasingly popular policy in many natural resource dependent communities of the developing world however the success of this policy approach depends on both collective action and institutionalization it is therefore important to evaluate collective action and institutionalization where the process of property rights decentralization is in progress this paper presents a modified version of the institutional analysis and development iad framework designed to analyze the decentralization of property rights and the collective action of community members to obtain these rights it describes a three phased framework for analyzing i the government property right decentralization policy ii the stock of capital assets in the community required to achieve property rights by initiating collective action and iii the development of an informal institution for effective property right distribution in the community finally to demonstrate its utility to collective action research we present a case study application of our modified framework to the fisheries property right decentralization policy of the bangladesh government and the subsequent collective action of a wetland dependent community

k william kapp s theory of social costs a luhmannian interpretation in developing his famous theory of social costs k william kapp claimed to draw inspiration from the theory of open systems the present paper reconstructs the notion of social costs from the perspective of the luhmannian theory of autopoietic social systems an alternative systems theoretic paradigm according to luhmann these systems build up their internal complexity at the cost of lowering their sensitivity to the complexity of their environment both societal and ecological from the luhmannian perspective social costs can be understood as those segments of environmental feedback that are thus ignored by social systems this perspective is not only consistent with kapp s own vision of social costs as a systematic outcome of private business enterprise but also even more radical as it traces these costs back to the regime of functional differentiation of society and thus to human civilization generally it follows from the luhmannian perspective that social costs can be reduced by improving the coordination between the individual functional systems such as economy law politics and science

influences of transaction costs in environmental policy abstract there is a growing literature reporting the extent of transaction costs for environmental policies however understanding why transaction costs occur and why they are small or large is also important for efficient policy selection and evaluation following an analysis of the organisational economics literature and reports of the extent of transaction costs for a number of environmental policies three key influences to transaction costs in environmental policies are identified these are the following 1 the characteristics of the transaction for the environmental good 2 the nature of the transactors and 3 the current institutional environment and arrangements these affect transaction costs to the government and all other parties influenced by a policy transaction costs occur due to actions of information collection and policy design policy enactment and establishment implementation and contracting administration and monitoring and enforcement an interrogation of transaction cost influences reveals that 1 the influence varies between parties and is affected by the actions and interactions of and between all parties to a policy 2 how transaction costs are experienced varies across time and 3 who experiences transaction costs depends on the policy itself future policy selection and refinement will benefit from empirical analysis of the causes of transaction costs

the long memory of the forward premium abstract the estimation of arfima models by approximate maximum likelihood estimation methods reveals the forward premia for the currencies of canada germany and the uk vis a vis the us dollar to be well described by a fractionally integrated process these models imply that all the forward premia are mean reverting although their autocorrelations are quite persistent this degree of persistence has led other studies to erroneously conclude that the forward premia contains a unit root jel c22 e31

institutions and the environment the case for a political socio economy of environmental conflicts this article presents a sympathetic but critical examination of institutional ecological economics iee a heterodox body of work on environmental governance as developed separately by j paavola and a vatn we highlight the theoretical limitations of iee related to two issues the causes of the emergence of environmental conflicts and the logics driving their regulation these limitations are all related to the underlying theories of institutional change in which power and legitimacy based explanations are confusedly combined both authors develop a normative perspective in which legitimacy becomes the main concern we argue that this perspective leads to contradictions in their respective approaches and provides no or only partial insights into the conditions of the emergence and regulation of environmental conflicts we finally highlight the conceptual adjustments inspired from classical marxism and regulation theory that in our view are needed to deal more adequately with these issues

real and spurious long memory properties of stock market data we test for the presence of long memory in daily stock returns and their squares using a robust semiparametric procedure of lobato and robinson spurious results can be produced by nonstationarity and aggregation we address these problems by analyzing subperiods of returns and using individual stocks the test results show no evidence of long memory in the returns by contrast there is strong evidence in the squared returns

the volatility of long term bond returns persistent interest shocks and time varying risk premiums we develop an almost affine term structure model with a closed form solution for factor loadings in which the spot rate and the risk price are fractionally integrated processes with different integration orders this model is used to explain two stylized facts first predictability of longterm excess bond returns requires sufficient volatility and persistence in the risk price second the large volatility of long term bond returns requires persistence in the spot rate decomposing long term bond returns we find that the expectations component from the level factor is more volatile than returns themselves and that the risk premium correlates negatively with level factor innovations

regional implications of north american integration a canadian perspective on high technology manufacturing using questionnaire data the paper outlines structural and performance responses of a sample of toronto s technology intensive manufacturers to the canada us free trade agreement fta of 1989 and the north american free trade agreement nafta of 1994 free trade has elicited complex reactions those firms with prior global and us export connections including large and small firms foreign affiliates and canadian owned firms were better prepared for the new trade regime in their product and production technology freer trade has stimulated firms with limited exports to seek improvements in innovation and productivity foreign affiliates have gained product mandates and increased outsourcing has been one of the production responses a partir des donnees provenant d un questionnaire cet article cherche aesquisser les reponses aux accords de 1989 entre le canada et les etats unis sur le libre echange canada us free trade agreement fta et aux accords nord americains de 1994 sur le libre echange north

aligning public good environmental stewardship with the landscape scale adapting mbis for private land conservation policy market based instruments mbis are rapidly becoming a dominant characteristic of the policy landscape for private land conservation in australia and elsewhere price based mbis are considered attractive to landholders who are provided with financial payments for the delivery of defined ecological outcomes on their land and for policy making where ecological return on investment can be measured quantitatively consequently mbis are commonly used to promote competitive individualized approaches to improve ecological values framed around the property scale we are concerned that there is a tension between the property centric focus of price based mbi programs and the need for environmental management policy and practice to reflect landscape scale social ecological processes targeting mbi programs at individual properties could risk generating insufficient public good conservation benefits if those programs fail to reflect the relationship between landscape scale processes and property scale conservation efforts to remedy the neglect of the landscape scale in private land conservation mbi policy we develop a definition of stewardship that directly connects landscape scale ecological function to the public good dimension of stewardship we apply this over arching definition to demonstrate how mbi programs can deliver on the goal of landscape scale conservation and to suggest when mbis might not be well suited to achieving private land conservation objectives