on the early holocene foraging to early agriculture we consider a world in which the mode of food production foraging or agriculture is endogenous and in which technology grows exogenously within a model of coalition formation we allow individuals to form co operative communities bands of foragers or farmers rationally at the lowest levels of technology equilibrium entails the grand coalition of foragers a co operative structure which avoids over exploitation of the environment but at a critical state of technology the co operative structure breaks down through an individually rational splintering of the band at this stage there can be an increase in work and through the over exploitation of the environment a food crisis in the end technological growth may lead to a one way transition from foraging to agriculture

an equilibrium conflict model of land tenure in hunter gatherer societies i apply features of the economics of conflict and spatial competition in developing a model of the emergence of land ownership in hunter gatherer societies tenure regimes are the result of interactions between those seeking to defend claims to land and those seeking to infringe on those claims the model highlights the dependence of land ownership on ecological parameters such as resource density and predictability and allows for situational ownership in which the nature of ownership changes as realized ecological conditions change the paper concludes with a comparative assessment of tenure across a representative sample of hunter gatherer peoples

on the origins of property rights conflict and production in the state of nature i analyse the emergence of property rights in a model of conflict and production in the absence of institutions of enforcement the population of agents evolves dynamically through conflicts for possession of factor goods among pairs of randomly matched agents conflicts are incomplete information wars of attrition with an agent s type consisting of his or her independently drawn valuation of the prize and cost of competing for it i prove equilibrium existence and show that in the steady state of the game the population sorts into two stable groups resource haves and have nots in accordance with a known function of their primitive types

toward an economic model of the japanese firm i owe a great deal to professor moses abramovitz who suggested that i write this article i appreciate his constant encouragement and guidance which aided me throughout its preparation i am also indebted to three anonymous referees of the journal and to professors ryutaro komiya and michael riordan for their critical comments and helpful suggestions needless to say i am solely responsible for the views expressed in this paper

a bioeconomic view of the neolithic transition to agriculture adoption of agriculture at the expense of hunting and gathering was the dramatic precondition for all modern civilization recent data suggest that because of this transition humans initially were more disease prone smaller less nourished and shorter lived to explain why individuals chose agriculture over hunting and gathering this paper develops a simple model of the evolution of preferences over the quality and quantity of children as would have been generated by our long history as a species these preferences would have induced the choice of agriculture but also would have led to these otherwise puzzling health effects l adoption de l agriculture en remplacement de la chasse et de la cueillette a ete une condition prealable dramatique pour toutes les civilisations modernes des donnees recentes suggerent cependant que en consequence de cette transition les humains sont devenus dans les premiers temps apres la transition davantage vulnerables a la maladie ont vu leur esperance de vie diminuer ont ete moins bien nourris et sont devenus plus petits pourquoi alors est ce que des individus qui avaient le choix entre deux systemes economiques ont choisi l agriculture pour expliquer ce choix ce memoire developpe un modele simple de l evolution des preferences quant a la qualite et la quantite des enfants celles ci auraient ete engendrees par notre longue histoire en tant qu espece ces preferences auraient engendre le choix de l agriculture mais auraient aussi entraine d autre part ces effets deconcertants sur la sante

third world competition and de industrialisation in advanced countries rapid industrialization in the third world during the last three decades and the continuing fast expansion of the south s manufacturing exports to the advanced countries has raised the question whether these have or will in the future lead to deindustrialization in the north this paper provides a consistent conceptual framework for analyzing this issue which is then applied to the experience of the u k economy it is concluded that in the 1970s u k manufacturing trade with the south lead to an increase rather than a decline in output and employment however the paper also provides evidence that in the future this trade is likely to become a source of disequilibrium and may contribute to deindustrialization copyright 1989 by oxford university press

contesting resources rent seeking conflict and the natural resource curse a growing empirical literature links natural resource abundance and pointiness to impeded economic growth and civil strife we develop rent seeking and conflict models that capture the most salient features of contests for resource rents and show how both resource abundance and geographical clustering can be associated with intense contests and sub optimal economic performance however we also show that these relationships are not necessarily monotonous pointiness can trigger more intense contests but can also facilitate the coordination on peaceful outcomes finally we show that contesting resources through violent conflict may yield superior outcomes from an economy wide perspective than contests through rent seeking

violence and property rights abstract since the middle ages when europe was still at a malthusian stage of development interpersonal violence has been in steady decline and institutions and norms limiting violence in particular property rights have expanded here we put forward a malthusian model of violence where these trends can be interpreted as a response to easing population pressure following an acceleration in technological progress the idea is that agents rationally risk dying in violent resource competition in order to make more of their children survive starvation violence carries a positive externality because those who die free up resources for survivors this generates a socially optimal level of violence which can be implemented with the right amount of property rights protection it is shown that faster technological progress can lead to a decline in violence and improved property rights protection similar to the path followed by europe

openness and the market friendly approach to development learning the right lessons from development experience abstract two central policy issues in economic development today are how open should a developing country be to the world economy and what should the government do or not do to promote rapid growth this paper examines these questions in relation to the highly successful east asian countries and contributes to the debate between world bank and heterodox economists the paper suggests that there has been significant convergence between the two schools on analytical and empirical issues but not on policy it takes this debate further by analyzing the principal issues still in contention

the economics of early warfare over land abstract we investigate the incidence of early warfare among foragers and farmers in prehistory our focus is specifically on conflict over land food is produced using inputs of labor and land and the probability of victory in a conflict depends on relative group sizes the group sizes are determined by individual migration and malthusian population dynamics both factors result in larger populations at better sites which deters attack there are two necessary conditions for warfare high enough individual mobility costs and large enough shocks to the relative productivities of the sites together these conditions are sufficient in particular technological or environmental shocks that alter the productivities of sites can trigger warfare but only if individual agents do not change sites in response these results are consistent with evidence from archaeology and anthropology

india s disappearing common lands fuzzy boundaries encroachment and evolving property rights opportunistic land encroachment occurs in many low income countries gradually yet pervasively until discrete areas of common land disappear this paper motivated by field observations in karnataka india demonstrates that such an evolution of property rights from common to private may be efficient when the boundaries between common and private land are poorly defined or fuzzy using a multi period optimization model and introducing the concept of stock and flow enforcement i show how effectiveness of enforcement effort whether encroachment is reversible and punitive fines influence whether an area of common land is fully defined and protected or gradually or rapidly encroached

the origins of inequality insiders outsiders elites and commoners hereditary economic inequality is unknown among mobile foragers but hereditary class distinctions between elites and commoners exist in some sedentary foraging societies with agriculture such stratification tends to become more pronounced we develop a model to explain the associations among productivity population property rights and inequality using malthusian dynamics we show that regional productivity growth leads to enclosure of the best sites first creating inequality between insiders and outsiders hereditary elite and commoner classes subsequently arise at the best sites food consumption becomes more unequal and commoners become poorer these predictions are consistent with a wide range of archaeological evidence

slavery and other property rights the institution of slavery is found mostly at intermediate stages of agricultural development and less often among hunter gatherers and advanced agrarian societies we explain this pattern in a growth model with land and labor as inputs in production and an endogenously determined property rights institution the economy endogenously transits from an egalitarian state with equal property rights to a despotic slave society where the elite own both people and land thereafter it endogenously transits into a free labor society where the elite own the land but people are free

peasants against private property rights a review of the literature land is the main if not the only asset for a majority of people in developing countries the definition and allocation of rights over land are thus naturally essential aspects of individuals daily lives as well as critical determinants of social and economic development the privatization of land rights has long been seen as a necessary process enhancing both efficiency and equity however privatized land rights have not always emerged endogenously while exogenously driven programs of land privatization have not always been successful nor popular this has raised questions about the expected benefits of land rights privatization this paper aims at summarizing the main arguments and studies both theoretical and empirical on this issue with a specific focus on the factors that can make privatization inefficient or detrimental for the most concerned individuals

how trade saved humanity from biological exclusion an economic theory of neanderthal extinction abstract one of the great puzzles in science concerns the rise of early modern humans and the fall of neanderthals a number of theories exist and many support the biological principle of competitive exclusion but the evidence for such mechanistic theories in which biology is destiny is limited in response this paper develops a behavioral model of neanderthal extinction we show how the endogenous division of labor and subsequent trading among early modern humans could have helped them to overcome potential biological deficiencies we discuss the relation between economics and natural selection and show how trade may partially offset natural selection

race and human capital reply to arrive at a tenable interpretation of black history it is important to resolve the conflict between my measure retrospective years of schooling completed and robert margo s measure prospective accumulation across ages of cohort specific attendance rates my series reconciled the apparent inconsistency between the stagnant pre 1940 black white income ratios and what scholars had previously thought was a steady narrowing of racial education differences margo s series not only would restore that incon

ethics politics and nonsatiation in consumption a synthesis in contrast with the production of goods and services by firms where the production costs are minimized under appropriate behavioral assumptions consumer producers in neoclassical theory maximize consumption expenditure i e production costs of their outputs according to kenneth boulding were the impact upon the limited resources available on planet earth taken into account consumption expenditure should be minimized we propose that we keep consumer theory as a reasonable description of reality however we should evaluate the long run consequences of such postulated behavior in a larger context which as a consequence of larger population with increasing per capita consumption comprises the overburdening of natural resources by decomposing the time horizon of cultural evolution into shorter periods of adjustment we may then distinguish several types of institutional determination of how societies take decisions as a group and individually the consumer theory simply reflects the predominant ethical values of which ideologies political platforms and demand patterns are shorter run adjustments

the economics of exogamous marriage in small scale societies marriage is a core institution in almost every human society including small scale societies based on foraging or subsistence agriculture a crucial dimension of the marriage systems in such societies involves endogamy and exogamy that is the choice of a marriage partner from within one s own community or from an outside community we develop a model in which the exogamy rate is higher when good local matches are scarce due to small community sizes and when productivity differs across communities due to environmental shocks these theoretical predictions are supported by econometric analysis of data from the standard cross cultural sample jel d13 j11 n30 z13

was japan s industrial policy successful some discordant voices however began to be heard by the mid 1970s while european writers were still supporting the conventional wisdom michalski et al 1972 carducci and padoa schioppa 1973 sautter 1973 boltho 1975 doubts about the effectiveness of government intervention were expressed in the united states in an authoritative survey of the economy patrick and rosovsky 1976 more recently this form of revisionism has gone further in a very careful reading of the evidence trezise 1983 has come to a sceptical conclusion about the role of japan s industrial policy according to him the major actor in post war growth was the free play of market forces driven by dynamic entrepreneurs and buttressed by high saving propensities

studying the role of political competition in the evolution of government size over long horizons here we argue for the use of cointegration and error correction analysis to combine economic factors that are nonstationary with political factors that are stationary into an empirical model of the evolution of public policy over long periods the approach is applied to disentangle the contributions of economics and politics to the evolution of public expenditure by the government of canada over 130 years political competition emerges as the primary political factor affecting government size

approximate optimality of aboriginal property rights in contrast to the relatively rich literature enlightened by many cases on property rights in modern societies the corresponding literature by economists on aboriginal societies is peremptory and uninformed by interdisciplinary studies this relatively brief literature is enlightened by only a few case studies and concrete examples both the analysis and its credibility can be improved by more use of relevant data covering a wider variety of cases this article undertakes such an endeavor using the observations of anthropologists of the diverse set of rights customs and practices of over fifty aboriginal peoples the cases considered here include peoples who used their group territories for hunting and fishing for gathering wild roots fruit vegetables and invertebrates and sometimes for primitive horticulture among the studied groups one observes almost all conceivable structures of rights the study of aboriginals can make especially clear the advantages of one type of property right over another because in most cases these people lived at the margin of subsistence in more developed societies departures from optimality mean lower living standards and lower growth rates luxuries these societies can afford by contrast in societies near the margin of subsistence with populations under malthusian control such departures had harsher effects which one would expect to see reflected in the surviving societies unsound rights structures generally implied lower population size and perhaps the disappearance of the society where the balance of advantage and disadvantage between alternative institutions was reasonably close however more than one could be found one therefore expects the data on aboriginals to provide relatively direct evidence on the structure of an optimal system of property