Research On The Property Rights And Environmental Problems

Coase(1960) indicated the effects of well defined property rights on total social benefits in disoperation problem. To start a new field of property rights and transaction cost in economics. On the base of Coase’s theory, this paper makes an further analysis to the system of the property rights’effects on environment, through simple functions explains "Coase Theorem".Under the hypothesis of zero transaction cost, to discuss effects of different kind of ownership to homo-economicus、natural resources’value and total social benefits. On the other hand, to consider relative researches of governments’ institutions of environmental management in the recent years, this paper explains how to utilize property rights to solve environmental problem more effectively in the positive transaction cost’s world, including the effects of the cost of defining property rights、the cost of making contracts、the cost of protecting property rights、the environmental law、 justice and benefits on total social benefits. On the other hand, to explore the property rights of different kinds of natural resources how to affect environmental quality. Property rights have direct and indirect effects on environment. Property rights indirectly effect environment through economy, education and technology. The last part in theoretical section is to discuss the indirect effects on environment by property rights. So this paper divide theoretical section into three parts, the first part is about the relationship between property rights and environment base on Coase’s theory; the second part is about different kinds of natural resources’property rights; the third part is about the indirect effects of property rights on environment.The next section is empirical analysis. At first, to establish an index system to measure the strength of property rights on the base of International Property Rights Index, IPRI, and to examine the rationality of this index. Than, using cross-country date to examine the relationship between property rights index and five indexes of environmental quality that include carbon dioxide emission, PM10, water resources’ quality, forest-covering area and the quality of agricultural soil.After controlling for GDP, education, technology and other factors, the econometric result shows that countries in which institutions of clearly defined and enforced property rights lead to reduced level of pollution. At last, using the last 50 years’ date to explore the relationship between property rights and the process of transformation of environmental protection laws. The econometric result shows that property rights have positive way to promote the formation of environmental protection laws.The Six Chapter is about companies that have pollution emissions behavior. This part explores the difference of targets between administrators of public firms and owners of private firms, and the difference of treatment between public firms and private firms by environmental protection department, and these cause of the different environmental performance of public and private firms. Through the study of Liaoning Province’s 109 firms’ cross-sectional data, and using place partition and industry partition methods by robustness OLS regression analysis, to analyze the effects of ownership on pollution emissions. The results indicate that public firms’ environmental performance are worse than private firms under certain conditions. Even though, government has improved environmental protection effects after 2007, many contamination accidents indicate that the management of public firms still have institutional barrier. To solve this problem need to cut off the interest relationship between government and public firms. On the other hand, private firms have better incentive to reduce pollution emissions after the issuing of "new environmental protection law".The last section is about Chinese environmental problems which also relate to property rights institution. At first part, base on the date and information of current situation of environment, to describe the most important issues of environmental protection in China. In the second part, to find out how to refine Chinese property rights institution for protecting environment. To suggest three ways to complete this goal, these are well defined property rights, making the property rights institution more effective, and to establish an effective market of pollution rights.