Browsing by Author "Silvestre, Joaquim"

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Comments on Elinor Ostrom's 'Governing the Commons'
(1992) Silvestre, Joaquim
"Governing the Commons offers important insights to a variety of issues, in particular to the design of stable and robust institutions, the creation of norms and the process of institutional change. I have nothing to say on these. My comments will focus on a different theme, dear to economists but which the book leaves somewhat implicit, namely the analysis of external effects. External effects (or externalities) can refer to production, to consumption or to both, and can be positive or negative. We say that producer A causes a negative external effect on producer B when an increase in A's production level reduces the amount (or quality) of the output that B can obtain with a given combination of inputs. A negative external effect induces a discrepancy between the private cost of intensifying A's activity (that is, the additional cost to producer A) and the social cost, which includes the additional cost imposed on B. The examples of Common Pool Resources discussed in Governing the Commons are particular instances of negative external effects in production."
Distributing the Benefits from the Commons
(1993) Silvestre, Joaquim
"The common-property literature has often focused on the question of efficiency. Here we consider distributional issues instead. How should the benefits of the commons (say, a fishery) be distributed? We approach the question from the viewpoint of ownership rather than income redistribution. "A first set of issues is the welfare comparison of an initial, inefficient status quo, called the open access solution, and various final, efficient allocations reached by regulation or privatization. We generalize Weitzman's result that fishers become worse off by privatization and we extend the analysis to the welfare of consumers. "Next we ask: What implications does the public ownership of the resource have for the distribution of its benefits? We analyze alternative approaches and propose a distribution rule based on the notion that both fishers and consumers should obtain the same rate of return from their (direct or indirect) contributors towards the fruits of the commons."
Public Ownership and Public Goods
(1992) Silvestre, Joaquim
"This paper is based on the inaugural lecture for the Master Program in Economic Analysis, year 1991-92, given on September 10 at the Universitat Auionoma de Barcelona."
Public Ownership: Three Proposals for Resource Allocation
(1989) Roemer, John E.; Silvestre, Joaquim
"While there is a quite clear picture of the rights that private ownership bestows upon the owner, it is not clear what property rights the public have by virtue of their owning a thing collectively. We ask: how should a planner, whose job is to respect public ownership of some productive assets, in conjunction with private ownership of some inputs, allocate resources? We insist throughout on the desideratum that: (1) the final allocation be Pareto efficient. We propose three additional desiderata: (2) equal division of benefits derived from public ownership; (3) equal returns to the use of privately owned inputs; (4) universal gain from improvements in the publicly owned asset. No more than one of (2). (3) and (4) is in general compatible with (1). Each of the three compatible pairs of desiderata characterizes a proposal for public ownership. We call the equal benefit solution the one characterized by (1)-(2). the proportional solution the one characterized by (1)-(3) and the constant returns equivalent mechanism the one characterized by (1)-(4). A discussion of these ideas in different institutions (a publicly owned firm, a cooperative and a common pool resource) leads us to advocate the proportional solution. Our main formal results are (a) the existence of proportional solutions in convex economies with arbitrary consumption sets and many inputs, outputs and firms and (B) the axiomatic characterization of the constant returns equivalent mechanism. Some simulations illustrate a surprising similarity between the proportional solution and the constant returns equivalent mechanism."