With property rights, there are plenty more fish in the sea
We at the Adam Smith Institute need little further evidence that property rights are the best way to an efficient allocation of resources. Even so, more literature on how property rights can work in different industries and regulatory environments is always welcome. A new National Bureau of Economic Research paper looks at how the strength of property rights can affect regulators' willingness to allow the exploitation of natural resources. They focus on the most common system of regulation, which sees a limited number of firms given the right to extract to the level of a cap set by a regulator. They attribute this, at least partly, to a benign form of regulatory capture.
Commonly, it is seen as an unwelcome anticompetitive force, leading to the overexploitation of resources by monopolistic producers in industries with clearly defined property rights. However, because of the temporary, weak, and ill-defined nature of rights in the natural resources sector, the authors suggest that this analysis is not applicable. Instead, they find that
when property rights to the resource are strong, the regulator’s choice (which is the product of resource harvesters’ influence) coincides with the public interest. However, when property rights to the resource are weak, the regulator’s choice leads to overexploitation. This suggests that the resulting extraction level is closer to the socially-optimal extraction level when rights to the resource are strong.
The authors distinguish between 'weak' and 'strong' property rights using the probability that such rights will be revoked – the more likely, the weaker the rights. They propose that, when rights are strong, firms influence regulators (either formally by voting in regulatory councils, or by informal means) to choose a lower extraction rate than they would in a situation with less secure property rights, because they are less concerned about those rights being revoked in the future. In addition, regulators discount utility from future harvests less when there is less risk of rights being revoked, causing them to favour less current extraction.
The paper tests this thesis empirically against novel panel data from 178 of the largest commercial fisheries, and finds that regulators are "significantly more conservative" in their management of resources when property rights are most secure. In those cases where poorly managed fisheries switch to a 'Catch Share' system, with more secure property rights, there is a significant fall in exploitation, supporting their thesis (the fall prior to the switch is attributed to a gradual policy change in the face of overexploitation):
If in practice the Coasean idea that the assignation and enforcement of property rights – through their effects on the decisions of regulators – lead to more efficient outcomes, this has important implications for policy. It gives us an even greater incentive (as if we need it) to promote the institution of secure property rights, especially in those resource-rich low-income countries which could be subject to a swift depletion of natural resources due not only to tragedies of the commons, but also to the insecurity of extractive firms property rights.