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Pejovich, Steve --- "Foreword" [2004] ELECD 96; 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 Title: Foreword

Author(s): Pejovich, Steve

Number of pages: 2

Extract:

Foreword
Steve Pejovich*


From the very beginning of recorded history, people have understood the
importance of property rights for their survival. In a very illuminating article
on `Aristotle on property rights', Fred Miller1 traces the recognition of the
social consequences of property rights back to ancient Greece. However,
most mainstream neoclassical economists considered private property rights
as an exogenous constraint.
It was only in the 1960s that systematic effort to internalize changes in
property rights into a theoretical framework began in earnest. Within a few
decades a number of scholars including Armen Alchian, Harold Demsetz,
Henry Manne, Douglass North, Richard Posner and Oliver Williamson pro-
duced a significant body of literature on the relationship between property
rights and economic performance. On the one hand, their research demon-
strated that different property rights have specific and predictable effects on
economic behavior. On the other, they were able to show that the interaction
between individuals' search for more knowledge and resulting changes in the
economic conditions of life affect the creation and/or modifications of prop-
erty rights. Of course, by demonstrating that systematic two-way relations
exist between alternative property rights and economic behavior, those schol-
ars did much more than merely explain the effects of alternative property
rights on economic behavior. They created the economic theory of property
rights.
By the early 2000s, the economics of property rights has scored impressive
academic gains. Recognizing those gains, Gregory Alexander (2003, p. 734)
said: `If its war against bird lovers, tree huggers, ...