When evaluating the economic efficiency of policies to reduce nonpoint source pollution, administrative or transaction costs are usually not taken into account. While the importance of transaction costs has been recognized in the theoretical literature, the fact that they are not incorporated in...

This article evaluates the effectiveness of ex-post targeting of the direct payment program for mountain agriculture in Japan. A regression analysis explaining the entry into the program shows that the farm profitability and the production cost were significant positive and negative factor,...

This article evaluates the effectiveness of ex-post targeting of the direct payment program for mountain agriculture in Japan. A regression analysis explaining the entry into the program shows that the farm profitability and the production cost were significant positive and negative factor,...

The theory of institutional traps, i.e. ineffective but stable institutions or behavior norms, is develope din connection with economic reforms. Mechanisms are described that cause a system to get into a trap and ways of going out of it are analyzed. Concepts of transformation costs and...

This essay first specifies and describes the behavioral and information cost assumptions that underlie instrumental rationality and the consequent a-institutional world of neoclassical theory and contrasts these assumptions to those that underpin a theory of institutions and transaction costs....

One of the main obstacles for successful economic development is the formation of institutional traps, inefficient yet stable norms of behaviour. Domination of barter exchange, arrears, corruption and black market activities are examples of institutional traps that have hampered reforms in...

Two myths have harmed many economies throughout the world. One is the theory of absolute advantage of central planning over the market mechanism, and the other is the belief that efficient markets develop spontaneously and quickly enough if appropriate economic legislation is established....

Any legislative framework is likely to generate different institutions or norms of behavior which the legislator occasionally could have never foreseen. I suggested a general pattern, on which inefficient, if stable, norms or institutions called institutional traps would form.