عوامل نفوذ هزینه معاملات در جبران توسعه : چه کسی خرس است و چرا؟

Environmental policy instruments generate transaction costs to public and private parties. There is a growing literature reporting on the size of transaction costs produced by environmental policy instruments. This paper extends that literature through an analysis of the factors that influence transaction costs in environmental policy and how this influence occurs. The theory based factors that influence transaction costs are categorised as: 1) transaction characteristics; 2) transactor characteristics; 3) nature of the institutional environment; and 4) nature of the institutional arrangements. We examined how these factors influenced transaction costs through the analysis of two Australian-based development offset schemes with different policy designs. We found evidence of all four theory-based categories of influence in the policy case studies. The degree of influence and how each factor influenced transaction costs varies across the two policies and between parties. Policy design as a component of the institutional environment had a particularly large bearing on transaction costs of offset buyers and the policy administrator. An important contribution to transaction cost theory assumes the institutional environment as given.

When environmental goods and services such as clean air, clean water or habitat for endangered fauna are not provided to the socially optimal level through markets, government intervention may be justified (Vatn, 1998 and Wills, 1997). Governments are becoming increasingly interested in policies which assign property rights to environmental goods and services and facilitate trade in rights to protect or deliver these desired environmental goods and services (for example, the Australian Government has a history of implementing market-based instruments www.marketbasedinstruments.gov.au). The caveat on government intervention is that the benefits of introducing the intervention relative to the status quo must be greater than the costs. Calculations of benefits and costs should extend beyond changes to producer and consumer surpluses to include transaction costs: the costs to define, establish, maintain and exchange property rights (McCann et al., 2005) as well as the costs to change organisations and institutions and define the problems that these institutions and organisations are intended to solve (Marshall, 2013, McCann, 2013 and McCann, 2013).

Evidence supporting the presence of all theory based influences of transaction cost was found across the two offset schemes. Two factors had a particularly notable influence on transaction costs — asset specificity and policy design. We also found that a number of interactions between factors were important for transaction costs and the degree to which these factors influenced transaction costs varied across parties. The very specific ecological nature and objective of offsets (site specificity) resulted in the non-transferability of knowledge gained from past offset transactions to new offset transactions (knowledge specificity) or more broadly the non-transferability of knowledge gained from past experiences. High asset specificity also made it costly to generate clear and consistent rules relevant for all trades which further influenced transaction costs through uncertainty. Knowledge specificity was particularly influential to the transaction costs of the administrator and offset buyers in both schemes and was a key reason for the prevalence of intermediaries such as brokers in offset transactions.