An Economic Appraisal of Ngai Tipu Whakaritorito: A New Governance Model for Maori Collectives

Interest in the governance of Maori collectives has grown considerably over the past decade as significant settlements have been made between the Crown and various tribes (iwi) under the Treaty of Waitangi and also as Maori collectives take an increasing role in providing social service delivery on behalf of government to Maori communities. Maori collectives pose complex challenges in the design of optimal governance systems given the many overlapping roles and relationships assumed by individual collective members and cultural dimensions of Maori organisation typically based predominantly around lineage and social standing. The Maori Development Ministry Te Puni Kokiri like other agencies argues that the wide range of governance entities currently used by Maori collectives for their various economic social political and cultural activities each have inadequacies that are exposed in the Maori collective context. It has proposed a new governance entity that it claims better meets the requirements of such collectives. This paper briefly describes and analyses the Maori collective governance problem from the perspective of the economics of governance and provides an appraisal of Te Puni Kokiri's proposal in this light. It is argued that the proposed new governance entity offers little more than existing available options and in fact may not be meeting any particular deficit in the governance framework for Maori collectives or otherwise. Standard and cooperative companies are shown to be more suitable for Maori collective governance than often thought. For the Te Puni Kokiri proposal to materially add to the governance options available to Maori collectives it will be important to consider it in the light of forthcoming proposals for assisting Maori collectives to establish their mandate and "voice.

Antitrust and Copyright Collectives – an Economic Analysis

The activity of the copyright collecting societies had been scrutinized by many antitrust authorities. The paper presents the decision taken by the President of the Office of Competition and Consumer Protection (UOKiK), which deals with abusing practices of Polish copyright collective society – ZAiKS. The paper concentrates on the economic aspects of the decision from the President of UOKiK.collecting societies, copyright, antitrust, transaction costs, welfare

Promoting Access to Intellectual Property: Patent Pools, Copyright Collectives and Clearinghouses

This paper reviews and compares patent pools, intellectual property clearinghouses and copyright collectives as systems for promoting efficient access to licensable intellectual property in a 'market for technology' (Arora et al, 2001). These systems promote downstream use of innovations by economizing on search and transaction costs in licensing, as well as potentially mitigating the conditions that lead to the 'tragedy of the anti-commons' and other coordination problems in multilateral licensing. We compare and classify different systems in terms of their features, review some existing systems, and discuss their economic characteristics.Intellectual property, licensing, markets for technology, collective rights management, patent pools, clearinghouses

The Effects of Federalism and Privatization on Productivity in Chinese Firms

This study offers empirical evidence about how the structure of government and private ownership affects productivity in Chinese firms. It uses the microdata of China's most recent decennial industrial census, covering all of the 23,000 large and medium industrial firms operating in China during 1995. The results show that government decentralization – 'federalism' – plays an important role in improving the performance of not just collective firms, but also state-owned and mixed public/private ownership firms. This result is strongly confirmatory of much of the recent theoretical work on transition economies that posits a key role for government in the efficient operation of markets. Privatization makes a big difference in performance for firms administered at the federal level, especially state-owned enterprises. Private ownership also makes a large difference for wholly foreign-owned firms, nearly all located in special districts. In local jurisdictions, however, there is little difference in productivity across the various nonstate ownership types, supporting the argument that the regulatory environment played a critical role in successful business performance.china productivity microdata ownership decentralization

Wage Differentials and Ownership Structure in Chinese Enterprises

This paper analyses the determinants of wage differentials among different ownership enterprises in urban China in 1955,using an extended version of Oaxaca-Blinder decomposition methods. We find higher wages in state-owned and foreign-invested enterprises compared to urban collectives, but no significant difference in hourly wages between central state-owned and foreign-invested enterprises. Moreover, we find strong evidence for segmentation on the Chinese labor market, the conjunction of segmentation and differences in hours worked being the major determinant of observed differences. We also show that, although foreign-invested enterprises allow for higher global annual income, it is at the cost of longer working hours.China., enterprise ownership, segmentation, labor market

The Evolution of Gender Earnings Gaps and Discrimination in Urban China: 1988-1995

This paper analyzes the impact of market liberalization on gender earnings differentials and discrimination against women in urban China at the beginning of the 90s. The observed stability in the overall gender earnings gap between 1988 and 1995 is shown to result from a complex set of evolutions across enterprises, earnings distributions and time. Our results highlight the interplay of opposing forces, economic reforms contributing to changes in managers’ behaviors in different dimensions. On the one hand, by bringing more competition, liberalization favored a reduction in discriminating behaviors in both urban collectives and foreign-invested enterprises; on the other hand, by relaxing institutional rules, it led to a loosening of the government’s egalitarian wage setting policies, leaving more space for discrimination in state-owned enterprises.gender earnings differentials, discrimination, enterprise ownership, urban China

Lawless Privatization?

This paper provides an historical analysis of the four privatization stages of the Russian economy covering the period 1986-2005 with particular attention to the initial period of private capital formation. We use data from the World Bank, the Russian Accounting Chamber and other publicly available sources to reveal how government policy - or lack of it - led to the emergence of privately owned companies, including enforcement agencies for property right protection with business-criminal relationships. Our analysis shows that the ultimate effect of privatization has been the transfer of ownership from the state to a few industry-based monopolistic structures with highly concentrated capital and unstable governance. Analyzed within the framework of new institutional economics, this paper provides a foundation for ongoing research on current Russian corporate ownership structures, capital formation and financial market development

The Evolution of Gender Earnings Gaps and Discrimination in Urban China, 1988-95

This paper analyzes the impact of market liberalization on gender earnings differentials and discrimination against women in urban China at the beginning of the 1990s. The observed stability in the overall gender earnings gap between 1988 and 1995 is shown to result from a complex set of evolutions across enterprises, earnings distributions, and time. Our results highlight the interplay of opposing forces, with economic reforms contributing to changes in managers' behaviors in different dimensions. On the one hand, by bringing more competition, liberalization favored a reduction in discriminating behaviors in both urban collectives and foreign-invested enterprises; on the other hand, by relaxing institutional rules, it led to a loosening of the government's egalitarian wage-setting policies, leaving more space for discrimination in state-owned enterprises.