Study Of The Economic Theory Of Modern Western Property Rights

The large-scale institution transformations in the former Soviet Russian and East-European socialist countries perhaps is one of the most dramatic phenomena in human history during the twentieth century ,and , at the same time , is one of the phenomena that is the most worth reflecting on and explaining for human beings. One purpose of my dissertation is to make a comparatively systematic study of the thoughts of the school of property rights economics from a perspective of reflection on or explanation of the economic institution reformation in the last century ,and to sort out the thoughts, dispersed sporadically among the different economists, that can help people explain the phenomena rationally, and try to turn them into systematic thoughts with a comparative explaining potential. The studies that have been made of the modern property rights economic theories up to now are still not thorough or complete. In the light of the facts, the second goal of this dissertation is to help people get a more complete and thorough understanding of the theories and to further the probe of some theory problems through a comparative investigation of the theories.This dissertation asserts that the most universal and, at the same time, the most important theoretic insights implicit in the thoughts of the modern property rights economists into the relations between economic institutions and economic efficiency is the idea that if utility maximization principle and bounded rationality is the realistic hypothesis of human beings, any institution arrangement that is formed as a result of the free choice by all the involved individuals will inevitably and universally have the nature of being efficient for the general economic activities under the general circumstances, while any institution arrangement that is not formed as a result of the free choice by all the involved individuals ,or that is formed by suppressing the freedom of the choice of the involved individuals ,will inevitably and universally have the nature of being inefficient. The idea is named the invisible hand principle for the choice of economic institutions in this dissertation. This principle implies that any society which must attach importance to economic efficiency has no freedom in the public choice of its basic economic legal institutions because it must choose those economic legal institutions that can give sufficient protection of the freedom of the private property rights in time, or at least, it should make sure that the behaviors of the people under the chosen economic institutions not deviate too much from those of the people when their private property rights are given sufficient protection, or else they will surely have difficulty in achieving their aims in time. It requires that the society unify the no-freedom in the public choice of economic institutions and the freedom in the individual choice of economic institutions as far as possible. That the modern property rights economic theories comparatively sufficiently disclose the mechanisms how economic efficiency inherently require the unification of the paradox in the choice of economic institutions shows that the understanding of the problem on the freedom and necessity in the choice of economic institutions has been further deepened. The fundermental aim of the dissertation is to comparatively systematically expound the thoughts by which the modern property rights economists show the existence of the invisible hand principle for the choice of economic institutionsWhether the problem, we consider, is on the freedom and necessity in the choice of economic institutions , or it is on the explanation of the phenomena of the large-scale conscious negation of the negation of economic institutions in the last century, they are both the problem on the relations between the economic institutions and economic efficiency when we look at them in a economics perspective. Property rights economics has prepared the theoretic logic structure for us to understand the problem. I think the structure is made up of four sectors: the first is the theoretic or logic starting points for the analysis of the relations between the economic institutions and economic efficiency; the second is generalized ideas of the relations between the economic institutions and economic efficiency; the third is concrete ideas of the relations between the economic institutions and economic efficiency; the forth and the last is the ideas of the relations between the economic institutions and politic institutions which is reflected in the theories of the guarantee of the establishment of the efficient economic institutions deduced from the analysis of the above three sectors. Thoughts included in the four sectors constitute the main part of the dissertation (besides the introduction and conclusion).The conception of the invisible hand principle for the choice of economic institutions is reflected in their exposition of the thoughts of the problems included in the above four sectors, so the process of expounding the thoughts is just the process of elucidating the idea.The first sector is made up of chapter one which expounds the methodology and the basic hypothesis of the human behaviors adopted by property rights economics . The second sector is made up of chapter three which mainly expounds Coase theory, theories of inefficient nature of common property rights institutions, theories of efficient nature of private property rights institutions, etc. The third sector includes chapter four through section one of chapter ten, which expound property rights economists' thoughts of the market, the firm and the state.. Chapter four is on markets theory .Chapter five is on the theories of the essence and the existence of the firm .Chapter six is on the theories of the rights and its distributions inside the firm. Chapter seven is on the theories of corporate firm. Chapter eight is on the theories of efficient nature of the firm based on free private property rights. Chapter nine is on the theories of inefficient nature of the firm based on no-free property rights. Section one of chapter ten is on the normative theories of the state. The forth and the last sector is made up of section two of chapter ten which is on the positive theories of the state. Besides the above contents are the introduction and conclusion of the dissertation which constitutes chapter one and chapter eleven respectively. In chapter eleven and the last chapter, I will reveal the invisible hand principle implicit in the theories of modern property rights economic school, prove its universal reality, and throw light on its theory value and implications for human beings' choice of the economic institutions.