تأثیرات هزینه معاملات در سیاست های محیطی

There is a growing literature reporting the extent of transaction costs for environmental policies. However understanding why transaction costs occur and why they are small or large is also important for efficient policy selection and evaluation. Following an analysis of the organisational economics literature and reports of the extent of transaction costs for a number of environmental policies, three key influences to transaction costs in environmental policies are identified. These are the following: 1) the characteristics of the transaction for the environmental good; 2) the nature of the transactors; and 3) the current institutional environment and arrangements. These affect transaction costs to the government and all other parties influenced by a policy. Transaction costs occur due to actions of information collection and policy design, policy enactment and establishment, implementation and contracting, administration and monitoring, and enforcement. An interrogation of transaction cost influences reveals that: 1) the influence varies between parties and is affected by the actions and interactions of and between all parties to a policy; 2) how transaction costs are experienced varies across time; and 3) who experiences transaction costs depends on the policy itself. Future policy selection and refinement will benefit from empirical analysis of the causes of transaction costs.

Land use decisions by individual landholders respond to a variety of incentives (Wills, 1997). Markets are the most widely used mechanism for signalling incentives to individuals in western society. Land owners are rewarded for land uses that produce marketable outputs but not for the other socially valued products such as the maintenance or enhancement of public goods (for example, environmental quality). When the market fails to supply a good to the level that is socially desirable, market failure is said to have occurred. It is at this point that intervention by government or non-government organisations to ensure the supply of public goods may be justified (Murtough et al., 2002). Intervention can be through a number of alternative policy instrument types: market based (including public purchase such as a competitive tender or public facilitation of a private market such as a cap and trade scheme), regulatory, or a combination which also draws on partnerships and social networks (Buitelaar, 2007). Each individual or package of policy instruments (hereon referred to as policies) provides a different level, mix and distribution of benefits and costs which occur over varying spatial and temporal scales. A caveat on any form of intervention is that it must be efficient; that the benefits are greater than the costs. Critical to calculations of net benefit is the inclusion of the cost of the intervention and within this, the inclusion of the transaction costs; the cost of resources to define, establish, maintain and exchange property rights ( McCann et al., 2005). The literature defining transaction costs is extensive (e.g. Cheung, 1969, Williamson, 1973, Williamson, 1981, Williamson, 1998, Dahlman, 1979, Barzel, 1985, Stiglitz, 1986, North, 1990 and Allen, 1991). There is also an extensive literature that sets out frameworks for measuring transaction costs broadly (Dahlman, 1979 and Stiglitz, 1986) and for measuring the transaction costs of environmental policies explicitly (Colby, 1990, Howitt, 1994 and Thompson, 1999) with the most comprehensive measurement framework provided by McCann et al. (2005). There is also a small but growing body of literature that report ex post measures of transaction costs of environmental policy ( McCann & Easter, 2000, Howitt, 1994, Falconer et al., 2001, Falconer, 2000, Falconer & Saunders, 2002 and Vatn et al., 2002; Rorstad et al., 2007; Kuperan et al., 2008 and Mettepenningen et al., 2009). What is missing in the current literature is an understanding and rigorous analysis of what influences transaction costs to all parties engaged in an environmental policy. That is, what influences transaction costs throughout environmental policy development, implementation and administration and what influences different types of transaction costs to be large or small and distributed across different parties. Without this information, policy decision makers may be limited in their ability to make informed ex ante decisions around policy selection, design and implementation frameworks for their problem context. Furthermore, efforts to refine the design of a policy for efficiency gains ex post are unguided ( Falconer & Whitby, 1999, Falconer et al., 2001 and McCann et al., 2005). The objective of this paper is to address this gap in the literature for the influences of transaction costs.3 This is done through a review and synthesis of the current transaction cost literature. Two main sources of information are utilised. The first is organisational economics where transaction cost influences are discussed in the context of selecting a governance structure for production coordination. The second is a compilation of studies that have measured the transaction costs of various environmental policy instruments. By drawing this literature together, a further contribution of this paper is highlighting current knowledge gaps and areas for future research. The paper is structured as follows. In Section 2 a background to the concept of transaction costs related to the supply of environmental goods, and how transaction costs occur in the creation and use of an environmental policy are provided. A discussion of measures of transaction costs of environmental policy highlighting the gaps in this current literature is also undertaken in Section 2. Section 3 contains the review of the current literature on what influences transaction costs. Section 3 also includes a discussion on how factors influence the transaction costs of both the public and private parties to the environmental policy. Section 3 concludes with a summary of influences of transaction costs for environmental policy. Conclusions, as well as discussion about further research, are provided in Section 4.

Studies that report the extent of transaction costs to all parties in the creation and use of environmental policy instruments are limited butincreasing.Thosethat existdemonstrate thattransactioncostscan be a large component of the total policy cost. Substantial effort has been made to inform transaction cost analysis and develop methods to increase the ability of the economics profession to measure transaction costs and by doing this, to better include transaction costs in policy instrument ex ante choice and ex post evaluation. The importance of measuring transaction costs to better select, understand and re fi ne policy is supported in this paper. However, in addition to generating an understanding of the magnitude of transaction costs, an understanding of the in fl uences of transaction costs should also be improved if ex ante policy selection and ex post policy evaluation is to achieve ef fi ciency objectives. The literature identi fi es three key in fl uences of transaction costs in the creation and use of an environmental policy. These are: the characteristics of the transactions to take place; the nature of the transactors; and the current institutional environment and arrangements. 7 A summary of these in fl uences and their sub components is illustrated in Fig. 1 . These affect the transaction costs to public and private parties due to their in fl uence on activities such as information collection, policy enactment, administration, contracting, monitoring and enforcement. The analysis of the in fl uences of transaction costs leads to a number of conclusions. First, the signi fi cance of an in fl uence to transaction costs varies between public and private parties and is affected by the actions and interactions between these two parties. For example, the biophysical characteristics of the environmental good and the nature of the transactors both have a bearing on the information collection transaction costs of both parties. However actionsby oneparty, such asinformationcollection anddissemination can signi fi cantly reduce the extent that these affect transaction costs for other parties.Second, how transaction costs are experienced varies across time. For example, transaction costs experienced in activities such as information collection and information provision in initial policy stages may reduce the policy transaction costs experienced in ongoing policy operation in the future. These fi ndings support those of Falconer et al. (2001), McCann et al. (2005) ,and Kuperan et al. (2008) with respect to transaction cost measurement. That is, the costs to all parties need to be analysed throughout the life of the policy to generate an accurate re fl ection of the total quantity and distribution of transaction costs. Finally, the signi fi cance of a transaction cost in fl uence depends on the policy instrument. For example, the in fl uences of administration and support transaction costs for a policy where the public is a purchaser of environmental goods in a competitive tender will be different to a policy where the public sets up a framework where private transactors can trade environmental goods. The in fl uences of transaction costs will be different again when comparing market based policy instruments with regulatory policy instruments. Policy instrument selection would bene fi t from a better understanding of measures and in fl uences of transaction costs of different policies and across different parties. The review of the literature revealed a number of weaknesses in understanding transaction costs of environmental policy. Not only is there a limited literature on the in fl uences of transaction costs of environmental policy, there are also very few analyses of the extent of transactioncostsofpoliciesto both publicandprivateparties.Measuring transactioncoststoprivatepartiesisahigh(transaction)costexercisein itself, however without this information a complete understanding ofthe net bene fi t (or otherwise) of a policy cannot be made. Furthermore, questions surrounding the burden of transaction costs and the actions that shift the burden between parties are not currently analysed. This conclusionis particularlyimportant giventhattherearetradeoffs tothe privatepartyofreducingpublic transactioncosts andviceversa.Finally, most quantitative studies of transaction cost measures and in fl uences have been conducted on programs that have voluntary involvement from private parties and with only one government ‘ buyer ’ of environmental goods. To completely understand environmental policy transactioncostmeasuresandthein fl uencesbehindthese,atransaction cost analysis across the suite of available and potential policy instruments is desirable.