RENT SEEKING, CONFLICT and PROPERTY RIGHTS
| Published date | 01 November 1989 |
| Date | 01 November 1989 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9485.1989.tb01100.x |
Scomjh
lod
of
Poliriccll
Economy,
Vol.
36,
No.
4,
November
1989
@
I989
Scottish
Emnomic
Society
RENT SEEKING, CONFLICT
AND
PROPERTY RIGHTS
ANTONY W. DNES
University
of
Buckingham
Following the pioneering work of Tullock
(1980),
Buchanan
(1980)
and
others, economists use the idea of rent seeking to describe actions of
individuals that transfer products or resources to themselves in ways that do
not create gains from trade. Lee writes that rent seeking covers
“. .
.
Activities motivated by the desire to capture private gains which have
non-positive impacts
on
social wealth”.
(Lee,
1985,
p.
207)
Continuing work has extended the areas to which the concept applies; these
range from the theory
of
the
firm
(Williamson,
1985)
to political lobbying by
monopolists and others (Buchanan
et
al.,
1980)
and includes
my
own work on
conflict within a common-property fishery (Dnes,
1985).
In an interesting recent paper, Ricketts
(1987)
argues that a careful
definition of rent seeking following subjectivist principles limits the applica-
tion of the concept to cases where
status-quo
property rights are challenged
outside
a
constitutional framework. The argument begins from the observa-
tion that there
is
an explicit or implicit constitution defining both a set
of
property rights and rules through which they may change. Ricketts would
exclude cases of conflict-related investments in industries like the fishery from
analysis as rent seeking, unless these were aimed at creating private rights
over the common-property
resource.
Such investments arise
if
individuals
adopt equipment (e.g. faster boats) aimed at beating human rivals to a catch,
when this would not be used
if
restrictions were placed on open access to the
fishery. The argument
includes
as rent seeking efforts to abolish monopoly
privileges and tariffs; although
it
is
implied that if these efforts were regarded
as constitutionally permitted they too would be excluded. Ricketts admits
that the results are perplexing but claims that his approach has advantages
of
logical consistency and
of
avoiding normative statements. We should note
that the technical results
of
models based on existing notions of rent seeking
are not affected
by
definitional changes.
This paper offers a development of the established approach. Whilst
Ricketts’ contribution is to be welcomed as clarifying the relationship
between rent seeking, entrepreneurship and property rights, his approach is
no less problematic than the established one. Moreover,
it
is
likely
to lose
sight of some important cases
of
economic conflict. The main purpose of this
Date
of
receipt
of
final
manuscript:
6
July
1989.
366
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