Homeowner self-governance constitutes a form of basic democracy, which means collective self-government without committing to conventional liberal values, and poses a tricky dilemma for the party-state. On the one hand, it can relieve the party-state of the burden of trying to govern hundreds of thousands of complex neighborhood problems that, if badly handled, could undermine the party’s legitimacy simply through incompetence. On the other hand, independent civic organizations may threaten the party leadership both within and beyond residential neighborhoods.

This chapter explores the connection between informality, migration, and precarity and how urban villages are formed in China. It discusses the contribution of the book and the fieldwork methods and introduces the readers to the structure of the book.

This chapter highlights the crucial role of property in the history of rights, both as one of the key concepts driving the development of rights theories (and protections) onward from an early time, and their modern adaptations in the eighteenth century. Given property’s oversized importance in this history, it is surprisingly missing from many recent accounts. But since the French Revolution, property has been at the heart of most political efforts to secure and protect rights. As this chapter demonstrates, the centrality of property for so many later reforms can in large part be credited to the insistent claims of the Physiocrats. Political society, they argued, must extend natural rights, rather than replace them with positive laws. Economic circulation was itself part and parcel of a “natural order,” with subjective rights at its basis. The chapter suggests that contemporary theories and assessments of the role of rights in political society remain partial as long as they do not include an understanding of the historical role that property has played among them.

Beginning after the end of Reconstruction, this chapter looks at the ways in which the police power emerged to facilitate an increasingly bold project of regulation. Key Supreme Court decisions supported the use of the police power to undertake and implement the objectives of a growing economy and a widening sphere of government. State power accompanied expanding national power and all levels of government tackled myriad persistent and new problems. In a case from the early twentieth century, for example, the Court upheld a vaccine requirement as a reasonable exercise of the public health authority of the state. Regulatory power was called into question by the Supreme Court’s Lochner-era decisions, but even this two-decades-long movement did not seriously threaten the ability of state governments to carry out ambitious regulatory agendas. Significantly, the Court put its imprimatur on the government’s zoning power in key cases from the late 1920s. And though the Court would message to the states that there were limits on how far they could go in restricting property rights, through doctrines such as “regulatory takings,” what emerged by the end of World War II was a robust conception of the state police power, one that gave government a wide sphere of action and authority to protect the general welfare.

This chapter touches upon the very large topic of how individual rights interact with the police power. In what sense and to what degree do rights contravene state and local exercises of the police power? It is a shibboleth that regulatory power is constrained by rights. But this chapter interrogates these issues in more depth and detail, by discussing how rights claims are framed in connection with the police power and how the government’s assertions of power are circumscribed by particular doctrines and arguments in courts. Further, the chapter considers how the debate over the nature and content of so-called positive rights implicates the police power questions, questions concerning authority and content.

In Chapter 10, contest models are utilized to illuminate crucial elements of traditional economic problems. These include competition for surplus within divisionalized firms, where inefficient divisions often dominate efficient ones; the significant expenses required to attain a monopoly position, including potentially bribing public officials for the allocation of monopoly rights; and the expenses incurred in obtaining property rights that, once secured (sometimes by violent and costly means), will be efficiently exchanged in the marketplace. In the last two cases, these expenses are so substantial that they might leave no social surplus. Additionally, the cost of political campaigns, in which factions compete for the vote to control a portion or entirety of the public sector through convincing voters of the correct choice, is also examined. Overall, it is shown that contests introduce a substantial and previously unnoticed welfare cost to the traditional issues studied, thereby complementing the existing literature on the subject.

This chapter discusses the difference in allocation of entrepreneurial talents in government and in commerce as well as its impact on the economy and society. The capabilities of those who engage in business activities determine not only the economic growth of a country, but also the size of enterprises, workers’ wages, and society’s morality. The chapter also discusses the type of system that is most favorable to entrepreneurial talents choosing to engage in entrepreneurial activities. Property rights protection is the primary determinant of the allocation of entrepreneurial talents between government and business. This chapter also uses the evolutionary game methodology to analyze the evolutionary equilibrium of entrepreneurial talent allocation and briefly analyzes the rise of China’s contingent of entrepreneurs over the last 40 years.

In Chapter 8, we reprise the economic concepts examined in the preceding chapters and introduce four emerging dogonomic topics. We showed how neoclassic economics is central to understanding both supply and demand for dogs, and behavioral economics also helps understand demand. We also posit four important emerging topics. First, we consider the evolution of the property rights of dogs and of property rights with respect to dogs. Second, we explain how we expect these property rights changes to affect policies relevant to the welfare of dogs. Third, we discuss the emergence of interest group politics around dogs. Fourth, we review the emergence of canine genetic sequencing and of phenotypic behavior to lead to further boutique selection, a step beyond artificial selection, and the likely impact of cloning.

In Chapter 6, we confront the reality that many dog owners must eventually face decisions about their dogs’ end-of-life, potentially including hard decisions about euthanasia or costly medical interventions. We frame these decisions about ending life in terms of the owners’ fiduciary responsibilities and what they imply across different property rights regimes. We show how framing the relationship between dogs and humans in terms of principal-agent theory may offer some novel insights about responsibilities. We explore the appropriateness of euthanasia and how individual preferences and societal perspectives on its appropriateness have changed over time. We then examine the growth in pet health insurance and pre-paid veterinary plans and how this growth affects the economics of the choice between various treatments and euthanasia. We conclude by considering how individual and societal attitudes toward the use of dogs in medical research have changed over time. Nonetheless, although the number of dogs used in research has declined in recent years, many dogs still suffer and experience premature death.

This chapter explains how New Institutional Economics (NIE) presents an innovative, interdisciplinary approach for topics of comparative law. It discusses the core principles of NIE and how they relate to the principles of comparative law. New Institutional Economics is a natural partner to comparative law and is especially useful in the study of law in context. The chapter discusses the contribution that the combined approach of NIE and comparative law brings to the scholarship of law. NIE provides ‘institutions’ as an easily understandable tertium comparationis. The chapter concludes with a call to add NIE to the comparative law methodological toolbox as a strategy to develop a sound analytical framework through which to better understand and more aptly rationalise the divergences and convergences observed in the laws of different countries.

Chapter 16 establishes the concept of an externality, a situation where a decision carries additional costs or benefits to a party not involved in the decision-making process. The chapter classifies several types of externalities and explores how and why they lead to undesirable outcomes. Then potential solutions to externalities as well as their strengths and weaknesses are discussed: subsidies, taxes, regulation, and the assignment of property rights. The chapter ends with a discussion of cost–benefit analysis and its role in evaluating interventions aimed at combatting externality problems.

Building on the introduction, Chapter 2 goes back to the more general notion of extractive institutions and proposes a theoretical framework that helps explain a conundrum in the literature according to which extractive institutions are sometimes beneficial and sometimes detrimental for economic development. I contend that the persistent effect of extractive colonial institutions depended on the extent of imperial infrastructural investment, the treatment of property rights, and the use of violence. The worst scenarios for long-run development demonstrate little public investment, the removal or weakening of individual property rights, and high levels of coercion through violence. In the second part of this chapter, I discuss the role of elites in the creation and perpetuation of such institutions. I argue that colonial subjects who had been deprived of public goods (because of underinvestment from the center), had not enjoyed individual property rights for centuries, and had been exposed to imperial violence, were likely to become alienated from the state. Such alienation persists over generations, outliving the formal institutions that created it.

This chapter deals with two other sets of generic institutional issues: state capacity and property rights. Both have received a growing attention by economists. They are probed here in the light of our six case studies and, occasionally, other countries’ experiences. The discussion of state capacity is articulated around three major issues: bureaucratic failures, inadequate incentives and professional norms (e.g., in the education sector), and ineffectiveness of the judiciary. Beyond technical and organisational aspects, politics also plays a major role in the three areas. The money needed to maintain support to clientelist or crony regimes is often obtained in exchange of favours to big business, through embezzled state budgets and kickbacks implicitly allowed at all levels of the bureaucracy. They strongly diminish state capacity. The discussion of property rights distinguishes between rights over business assets and rights over land, the latter being especially important in countries where a large proportion of the population depends on agriculture. Special attention is brought to what we call the ‘maze’ of land laws, as observed in many developing countries.