This paper uses provincial macro-data from the mid-1980s onwards to investigate the determinants of land-use choice in rural China, by paying a particular attention to the decision to plant trees as competing with agriculture. The evidence supports the importance of economic motivations in the...

In this paper, we develop a model of institutional change of land property right in China, which include the influences of lobbying and the political power division in 1978. The model illustrates how extra gains are produced under different institutions and how lobbying and political power...

During the Ming and Qing Dynasties, fixed-rent tenancy gradually replaced sharecropping as the dominant form of land tenancy in China. This paper hypothesizes that the secular shift in land tenure was an adaptation to the change in land utilization system towards more intensive cropping. To test...

We examine three reforms to property rights introduced by the United States in the Philippines in the early 20th century: the redistribution of large estates to their tenants, the creation of a system of secure land titles, and a homestead program to encourage cultivation of public lands. During...

The objectives of this analysis are to evaluate the technical and scale efficiency of rice farms in West Java and to identify determinants affecting farms’ efficiency. Further, the farm size–productivity relation is investigated. Data Envelopment Analysis is used to estimate technical...

The mainstream view that decollectivization significantly contributed to China's agricultural growth has recently been challenged by revisionists, who emphasize the positive effects of the socialist legacy, such as irrigation and mechanization. This study contributes to this debate by explicitly...

One of the main objectives of the World Trade Organization (WTO) is to facilitate world’s trade and production. It enforces legally binding multilateral agreements on trade in goods, services and trade-related aspects of intellectual property rights. The Trade Related Intellectual...

In the game theory literature, Garrett Hardin's famous allegory of the tragedy of the commons has been modeled as a variant of the Prisoner's Dilemma, labeled the Herder Problem (or, sometimes, the Commons Dilemma). This brief paper argues that important differences in the institutional...

The objectives of the paper are to show how the sustainability of urban settlements can be improved by treating as a variable the design of: (a) property rights to realty, corporations and currencies and: (b) their communication and control governance architecture. System science provides the...