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Colombatto, Enrico --- "Are Property Rights Relevant for Development Economics? On the Dangers of Western Constructivism" [2004] ELECD 108; in Colombatto, Enrico (ed), "The Elgar Companion to the Economics of Property Rights" (Edward Elgar Publishing, 2004)

Book Title: The Elgar Companion to the Economics of Property Rights

Editor(s): Colombatto, Enrico

Publisher: Edward Elgar Publishing

ISBN (hard cover): 9781840649949

Section: Chapter 11

Section Title: Are Property Rights Relevant for Development Economics? On the Dangers of Western Constructivism

Author(s): Colombatto, Enrico

Number of pages: 19

Extract:

11 Are property rights relevant for development
economics? On the dangers of Western
constructivism
Enrico Colombatto*


On the notion of economics
Modern economic analysis is usually conceived in two different ways. Some
believe that economists should study how given policy goals can be attained.
In particular, when mutually inconsistent objectives are proposed, social
scientists should describe the implicit trade-offs and suggest solutions, poss-
ibly by referring to targets of a higher order. The main actors are thus the
policy maker, who defines the objectives, and the social engineer, who de-
signs the course of action consistent with the assigned target.
Contrary to this widely shared (mainstream) view, the subjectivist school
claims that all social sciences should be dealing with the way individuals
behave and interact in order to pursue their own aspirations. The search for a
social goal should thus be ignored, for it would necessarily be based on
arbitrary utilitarian hypotheses, thereby leading to useless or even harmful
results. In particular, (free-market) economists should focus on the analysis
of human conduct in the presence of scarcity constraints, whereby individ-
uals have to choose what to sacrifice in order to meet their preferences or ­
more precisely ­ to increase their satisfaction.
The differences between these two views have important consequences
from the moral, positive and normative standpoints. They also define the
different roles of property rights within the context of growth and develop-
ment. The first part of this chapter is thus devoted to recalling the ethical
validation of ...