The Evolvement Logic And Investigation, Quantization Study On The Efficiency Of Property Rights

The fundamental aim of property rights research is to test efficiency of different property rights forms or arrangements, by comparing, selecting, adapting, amending and reconstructing, in order to maximize both benefit of property right subject and social welfare, or to converge toward maximum. Facing the advancing reforms in the social development environment, only to hold a static, single-aimed concept of the property rights efficiency has no good to resolve the property rights supply efficiency in real life. In order to avoid not only rigid or inert property rights efficiency, but also the imbalance between property rights supply and the current economic conditions, the study on the evolution of property rights efficiency is even more important. This thesis explores the evolution of property rights efficiency, and makes both the evolutional logic of property rights efficiency and investigation, quantization study including quantitative analysis and empirical investigation, as the main line of this research, from a dynamic evolution perspective, following the basic research methods and tools of property rights economics.The theoretical initial contents is to summarize previous study and then to obtain the cornerstone and enlightenment, including the basic property rights theory of new institutional economics, the theory of institutional efficiency evolution, and the logical distinction among three classical paradigm of Western property rights economics school——Marx's property rights theory, property rights theory of the new institutional economics and that of contract economics. And then to refine the main measure standard and basic research tool of the study on the evolution of property rights efficiency. By classification and comparison, we should make clear them as follows. Firstly, the basic standards and requirements of property rights efficiency are to reduce transaction cost while increasing the total revenue of property rights system, or to resolve internalization of externality. Secondly, transaction cost or generalized institution cost is the main research tool. Thirdly, incomplete property contract approach is applicable to the study of property efficiency. Fourthly, the highest criterion to measure property rights efficiency should be the maximum criterion of both individual welfare and social welfare.This thesis constructs the institution cost structure in the course of property rights dynamic evolution, from the evolutional perspective. That is to say this study includes a variety of cost or expenses in this course, mainly from the two dimensions. Firstly is from the dimension of social institution, and the institution cost includes defining property rights such as technical measure, information gathering, decomposition of power, negotiation and consultation, and the running cost of property rights such as making rules, publicizing and diffusion, quitting of obsolete property rights, the reconstruction of contracts, supervising and implementation. Secondly is from the dimension of individual bearing, and the cost of related bodies includes the loss, compatibility and protection cost in the evolution of property rights.This thesis puts forward the hypothesis on life cycle of property rights efficiency, which is the greatest theoretical contribution in my thesis. It is considered that efficiency of property rights is in gradual evolution, with mechanism feature of life cycle of efficiency, and its fundamental goal is to maximize the freedom of property rights, that is to say, the freedom of selectable reward from property rights tends to maximization. The efficiency security period and loss period appear in every life cycle of property rights efficiency with some variation factor and constraints, and the change of transaction cost is reflected in each life cycle. Thousands of life cycles of property rights efficiency, which are called the short-term supply curves of property rights efficiency, compose a long-term supply curve of property rights efficiency in theoretically. This long-term supply curve is the envelope curve of all short-term efficiency equilibrium points. The evolutional efficiency of property rights is not equivalent to evolutional property rights institution. Therefore, this theory about life cycle of property rights efficiency is helpful to not only form a dynamic, progressive and evolutional concept of property rights, but also further study and systematic grasp all kinds of inducement and evolution law behind the evolution of property rights, and then the mystery of property rights evolution will be revealed. So this theory could be the basic theoretical reference which is applied to design and innovation toward property rights system, in order to reduce design mistake of property rights system, to enhance scientific nature, rationality, adaptation and prospect of property rights supply.To reduce transaction cost is an important measure criterion on the efficiency of property rights. Therefore, this thesis further uses the economic elastic theory as a quantitative tool, and firstly proposes the concept of property rights elasticity of transaction cost, which is applied to analyze different response, sensitivity and adaptive capacity of different property rights subjects in the course of the change of property rights. Those are reflected in the rate of change of transaction cost induced by the improvement of property rights. As a result, this study quantifies the measure criterion on the efficiency of the change of property rights, and then makes the basic theory analysis and further adopts some random samples about state holding and that transformed non-state holding listed companies as application examples. This quantified study on evolutional efficiency of property rights is also an innovation in my thesis. This study forms a quantified measure tool about whether transaction cost can be reduced or the reduced degree by a property rights arrangement. This new method quantifies previous qualitative measure criterion, and it is useful to take property variable into economic growth model and institution model, in order to make the empirical research more operable and realistic.The empirical research component is to empirically investigate efficiency of resource property rights in current period of reform and evolution, such as circulation of China's rural land property rights and state-owned forest property rights system reform, and also the coupled system between macro-property rights structure and macro-economic growth, based on the aforementioned theoretical thinking, methods and tools. And then some pertinent institutional path and strategy were put forth, in accordance with those specific economic conditions and the crux of property rights.One case analysis is to put forth multiple principal-agent structure of property rights based on the situation about the early circulation of agricultural land in Chongqing Municapality and Sichuan, Guangdong Province. The first-level principal-agent property rights relationship is that the state owns the ownership of agricultural land, and famers have land use rights, rights to residual earnings, and assignment right. The second-level principal-agent property rights relationship is that the rural grass-roots political power arranges the property rights of agricultural land on behalf of the state. The third-level principal-agent property rights relationship is that the principal-agent relationship between farmers and intermediary organizations. The efficiency imbalances arise in the second and third-level principal-agent property rights relationship. Due to the emergence of the principal-agent cycle of alienation resulting from land property rights violations and super economic coercion from the rural grass-roots political power; and the emergence of the weak principal-agent act between farmers and the agriculture intermediary because of inadequate property rights market, our country's agricultural land is in a poor circulation. In order to avoid institutional imbalance, the basic task is to build the formal institutional arrangements with the core of marketable ownership, that is to say, to adopt the marketable and legal means to avoid the failure of property rights. In addition, facing the increasing effective demand of land, our central government should establish both an Outline of Chinese Land System and an Act of Land Property Transaction as soon as possible, instead of providing discontinuous, scattered and lagging institutional supply, so as to promote the basic institutional equilibrium between short-term and long-term.After the analysis on the situation of forest industry area in Heilongjiang province and Yichun state-owned forest right reform, case 2 points out the existing hidden danger of forest rights contract, such as property lock, property monopoly, the uncertain cost of property rights, the unverifiable afterwards return, based on property contract methods. This chapter points out that timber harvesting rights is the main residual control rights of forest property rights contract. And its ownership restricts the success or failure of state-owned forest right reform. The realization of full privatization of state-owned forest does not be supported. The classified forest property contract models should be constructed basing on the differences in resource attribute and operating cost between state-owned ecological forest and commodity forest. These contract models make classified design and implementation including the ultimate institutional goals, the constraint mechanisms, basic property rights ownership, timber harvesting rights and ownership, the investment subject, resource allocation mechanisms and environment of property rights, in order to realize multiple equilibrium of property rights efficiency in state-owned forest right reform.The last chapter builds vector auto-regression model and the corresponding pulse function to empirically study coupling efficiency of property right evolution and macro-economic growth, adopting macro property right structure and the real economy investment growth as variables, using the time-series data in Liaoning Province as samples. The conclusion of this econometrics analysis as follows. A long-term and lag coupling course is the interactive feature of the evolution between macro property right structure and the investment growth. In the early evolution, their interactive negative effects appear. After a certain time delay, their positive cross-effects then emerge. Once eventually the positive cross-effects really work, this period of steady growth is relatively long. Especially the more prominent contribution of the evolutionary property rights structure to the increasing investment is significant. Therefore the institutional task should be to shorten their initial adjustment and to weaken the initial negative effect.