Abstract
The tragedy of the anticommons unfolds when separate social agents—be they private owners of a property who intend to use the property for their own economic benefit or political actors who pursue their political objectives—do not hold effective rights to use their economic or political power for their own purposes without consent of the other players of the economic or political game. I shall discuss the Greek government debt crisis and the Eurozone countries’ policies toward Greece within the analytical framework of the tragedy of the anticommons in this paper. I do not intend to dig deep into the structure and long-term trends of public and private finances in Greece. I shall only show that the successive bail-out programs of the Eurozone countries were doomed to fail because of these countries’ competitive and non-cooperative approach to the Greek financial problems. I shall also show that a coordinating agency, say the IMF, can foster the coordinated outcome only under strict informational conditions.
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Notes
Coase (1960).
About the importance of transaction costs, see also Williamson (1981).
The example follows the logic of Buchanan and Yoon (2000).
Source: Eurostat (2014).
My reviewer suggested using non-linear cost functions in the analysis of the Greek bail-out program. I show that assuming a non-linear rather than linear cost function would not alter the main conclusions of the paper.
My reviewer suggested addressing this case for which I am grateful.
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Acknowledgments
Research in this paper is part of a larger project on “Tragedies of Anticommons in Politics and in Economic Policy” that we jointly conduct with Ronald King (San Diego State University) and with Marian Cosmin (Babes Bolyai University, Cluj-Napoca). I am indebted to my colleagues, Ronald King at San Diego State University, and to Cosmin Marian at Babes Bolyai University, Cluj-Napoca, Romania for their comments on the anticommons model I developed. I am also grateful to the Hungarian National Science Foundation (OTKA, grant no. 104400) for its financial support, and to the organizers and conference participants of the IAES annual conference in Madrid in April, 2014 for their support and useful comments on my paper.
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Major, I. A Political Economy Application of the “Tragedy of the Anticommons”: The Greek Government Debt Crisis. Int Adv Econ Res 20, 425–437 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11294-014-9494-8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11294-014-9494-8