
ARTICLES
Chinese Journal of Population, Resources and Environment 2008 Vol. 6 No.4
13
Unit Environmental Property Rights: Efciency,
Responsibility and System
Li Ruie, Huang Yi
Economics and Finance School, Xi′an Jiaotong University, Xi′an Shaanxi 710061, China
Abstract:
The inexplicit efficiency of environmental property
rights lies in its fuzziness. Based on the character of environmental
property rights discussed, unit environment shows intra relation-
ship between efciency and duty of environmental property rights,
and constructs a symmetrical system arrangement. Through ana-
lyzing the possibility and feasibility of unit environmental prop-
erty rights, the signicance of symmetrical system arrangement to
avoid the inexplicit efciency of environmental property rights is
discussed in this dissertation from the aspect of the validity of of-
fering and implementing system.
Key words:
environmental property rights, efciency, responsibil-
ity, system
1 Introduction
According to the latest report from China’s State Envi-
ronmental Protection Administration, the annual loss origi-
nating from China’s environmental pollution has reached
10% of GDP. “If present pollution level keeps a steady
increase, the total pollution amount will increase twofold
when China’s GDP is doubled till the year 2020” (Pan,
2006). The existing state of pollution’s “negative value” not
only conceals “the negative value” of quality in the field
of economy growth, but brings serious consequence to the
people owing to pollution. Of course, environment deterio-
ration is a complicate economic and social problem, but one
of the fundamental causes of pollution is that environmental
property rights are indistinct and environment utilization is
irregular. In order to search for personication representa-
tive and make environmental property rights realizable, this
article attempts to achieve unit differentiation of environ-
mental property rights based on efficiency, responsibility
and system, and to construct a system arrangement in the
eld of coordinating environment benet with environment
responsibility.
Corresponding author: Li Ruie (liruie@sina.com).
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2 Property rights, environmental property rights
and unit environmental property rights: comment-
ing on the relative articles
The general expression of property rights is “a power-
ful incentive to allocate scarce goods in different uses”
(Newman et al., 1996), and it exists in diverse forms. Pri-
vate property rights are “a right to allocate scarce goods in
contradictive uses” (Newman et al., 1996). It belongs to
the category of the right of exclusion. Nevertheless, not all
resources are applied under the control of private property
rights. These “common-property resources” possessing
a sense of environmental property rights such as: rivers,
lakes, air and natural scenery, etc. belong to public property
rights. Compared with private property rights, the major
difference lies in that “‘common-property resource’ as a re-
source or property has many owners, the owners each have
a right to use, but don’t have the right to prevent others
from using common-property resource so that the common-
property resource will be overused and exhausted” (Hardin,
2001). The owner of environmental property right “exists
in name only” (too many owners means no owners), but the
property rights gainers are real—each citizen is able to ac-
quire the happiness from ne environment and unhappiness
from pollution.
Environmental property rights have the nature of com-
mon property rights, but “the right beam” must be complete
at the same time. The “right beam” balance is easy to break
and lead to the twin-existence of rare resources and low
efciency. “System arrangement must try to realize the bal-
ance among a few aims” (Demsetz, 1991).
Unit environment is a relatively independent system,
and unit environmental property rights are the right beam
which the environment owner owns relatively independent