JOURNAL OF APPLIED BUSINESS AND ECONOMICS
Emergent versus Directed Property Rights: Evidence from
Transition Economies
Author(s): Scott Beaulier, Joshua Hall
Citation: Scott Beaulier, Joshua Hall, (2011) "Emergent versus Directed Property Rights: Evidence from Transition Economies," Journal of Applied Business and Economics, Vol. 12, Iss. 2, pp. 80 - 89
Article Type: Research paper
Publisher: North American Business Press
Abstract:
While property rights are important to the market order, the transformation of common pool resources
into private property through privatization has achieved mixed results. We argue that the so-called
“Washington Consensus” failed not because of intentions or intelligence, but because most economists
have failed to appreciate that property rights are emergent institutions. Instead, much of the work in
development treats property rights like an exportable good. In this paper, we use evidence from the postcommunist
transition to provide preliminary evidence that countries that used direct auctioning to
allocate property rights following transition outperformed other methods of privatization.