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,...

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....

This article concentrates on the development of institutional economic theories which have begun to study institutions and their role in the economic development and behavior since the very end of the 19th century. Institutional theories have been a critical reaction to the almost complete...

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.

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....

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...