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Cap. 3 y Cap. 4.
Capitulo 3
Preguntas básicas:
¿Qué quieren decir los economistas cuando afirman que la economía es eficiente?
¿Qué condiciones han de satisfacerse para que los mercados sean eficientes?
¿Por qué se presupone generalmente que los mercados competitivos generan
resultados eficientes?
Adam Smith postulaba en “La riqueza de las naciones” que era una mano invisible
la que hacia que los agentes, por medio de decisiones individuales y egoístas,
fomentaran el interés público.
La intuición de Smith era sencilla; “si existe algún bien que la gente valora pero
que aun no se produce, se estará dispuesto a pagar algo por el”.
Los dos procesos anteriores dan como resultado el que en el contexto global de
este mercado único se iguale la curva de oferta agregada con la demanda
agregada.
3.3 Análisis de la eficiencia económica.
Para que exista eficiencia en el sentido de Pareto los economistas consideran tres
aspectos necesarios.
Isocuantas e Isocostes
Una isocuanta indica las combinaciones de factores (tierra, trabajo) que generan el
mismo nivel de producción. La pendiente de la isocuanta es la relación marginal
de sustitución técnica. La recta isocoste indica las combinaciones de factores que
cuestan lo mismo, la pendiente de la isocoste viene dada por los precios relativos
de los factores de producción. La empresa maximiza producción dado un
determinado nivel de gasto en los factores, en el punto en el que la isocuanta es
tangente a la recta de isocoste.
Utilidad: satisfacción que reporta una persona del consumo de una determinada
combinación de bienes.
Curva de Posibilidades de Utilidad: Representa el nivel máximo de utilidad que
pueden alcanzar dos consumidores. Nivel máximo de utilidad de cierto agente 1,
dado el nivel de utilidad de otro agente 2.
Por lo tanto si una economía es eficiente en el sentido de Pareto debe encontrarse
sobre la curva de posibilidades de utilidad, en donde no es posible aumentar la
utilidad de uno de los agentes sin disminuir la del otro.
Capitulo 4
Preguntas básicas:
¿Cuáles son las principales razones por las que los mercados no generan
resultados eficientes?
¿Cómo contribuye el Estado a que funcionen los mercados?
¿Por qué interviene el Estado en los mercados incluso cuando son eficientes?
¿Cuál es el enfoque del papel del Estado basado en los fallos del mercado?
¿Cuales son las demás perspectivas sobre el papel del Estado?
Para que funcionen los mercados tiene que haber un estado que defina los
derechos de propiedad y vele por el cumplimiento de los contratos. La gente no
tendría suficientes incentivos para ahorrar e invertir si no estuviera prltegida la
propiedad privada ya que podrían quedarse sin ahorros.
4.2 Fallos del Mercado y el papel del estado
1. Competencia imperfecta
2. Bienes Públicos
3. Externalidades
4. Mercados Incompletos
5. Información Imperfecta
6. Paro y otras perturbaciones económicas.
Varias las razones por las cuales la competencia puede ser limitada:
Para dicho tipo de bienes el mercado tiende a ofrecer muy poca cantidad, por lo
cual son un perfecto ejemplo, que aunque el mercado funciona de manera
eficiente el estado se ve obligado a intervenir, de lo contrario, no habría suficiente
cantidad de dicho tipo de bien.
3.- Externalidades
Cuando los actos de una persona o de una empresa afectan a otras personas o
empresas.
Y este por ejemplo es un caso en que producir mucho de un bien puede perjudicar
a la sociedad en general, por lo que el papel del estado es regular dicha
producción o consumo.
Otro problema:
Mercados Complementarios: supongamos que a las personas solo les gusta el
café con azúcar y que sin café no hay mercado de azúcar. Dado este problema un
empresario que este considerando invertir en el mercado del café no lo haría dado
que se daría cuenta que no vendería nada.
En conjunto uno de los supuesto en los que nos basamos para dar el Teorema
fundamente del bienestar, es que existe información perfecta, por lo que bajo esta
condición no podríamos asegurar que se cumpla.
En general se atribuyen las fuertes recesiones que han azotado a las economías
capitalistas los últimos años. La gran depresión de los 30`s, la crisis de la deuda
de toda América Latina a mediado de los ochenta, son solo ejemplos do como
dichas crisis logran afectar y sacar de equilibrio a los mercados.
II
If the income distribution is grossly unfair, the concept of voluntary decisions and
unanimous consent is a charade; necessity is no less coercive for being economic
instead of political.
Market transactions cannot take place at all without a prior stipulation by political
means of property rights and definitions, which in turn strongly influences the
efficiency and the distribution of gains from trade.
Societies seeking to achieve a high standard of living have three major options of
organizing individual citizens toward that end: coercion, self interest incentives, and
what we might loosley call the “emotional” forces listed above. Every society relies
on some combination of the three, but in the matter of emphasis there are vast
differences.
Harnessing the “base” motive of material self interest to promote the common good
is perhaps the most important social intervention mankind has yet achieved.
In most cases the prerequisite for social gains is the identification of the defects in
the incentive system that drive ordinary decent citizens into doing things contrary to
the common good.
Because individuals can choose freely, the prices that millions of them are willing
to pay reflect the values they put upon various forms. Moreover, as far as the
efficient provision of recreation for society as a whole is concerned, even individual
sellers of recreational opportunities do not need to know their lie is willing to pay for
at costs that permit a reasonable profit survive; the others do not.
The more complicated and extensive the social intervention, and the more it seeks
to alter individual behavior, the more difficult it becomes to accumulate the
necessary information at a central level.
A third advantage of the market as a means of social organization is its “devil take
the hindmost” approach to questions of individual equity.
From the standpoint of static efficiency the more completely and rapidly the
economy shifts production to meet changes in consumer tastes, production
technologies, resource availability, or locational advantages, the greater the
efficiency. From a dynamic standpoint the greater the advances in technology and
the faster they are adopted, the greater the efficiency.
There are three ways in which society can deal with these income losses:
1. Prevent the particular changes from taking place, thereby mooting the question
2. Make it up to the losers either with monetary payments (compensation) or with
offsetting changes that improve their welfare (logrolling)
3. Rather than compensate for each change, use the tax and transfer system to
ensure that the cumulative effect of all the changes is an income distribution that
meets society’s standards of fairness and equity
The standards and values that our society employs when dealing with losses
associated with market efficiency are substantially different from those it uses
when faced with the possibility of losses through government actions.
The political system enforces the “do no direct harm” rule by very loose
arrangements, in which the effective vote of a particular group on a particular issue
is weighted according to the potential harm that a decision might inflict on it.
III
Before trade can occur, there must be an underlying social agreement to define,
and enforce, property rights.
The structure of the private enterprise system and the efficiency with which it
operates depend on the content of this system of property and contract laws.
There are essentially four sets of factors whose existence lead to market failure
and also limit the range of corrective action available to society:
Transaction costs
Markets are not costless. Sometimes transaction costs exceed the benefits that a
market could otherwise confer.
When a fairly simple and easily calculable result is wanted, the delicate
adjustments that a price system is capable of producing are not relevant. Hence,
regulatory limitations or flat prohibition may be the least costly and most effective
solution.
In the case of hazards that are highly complicated, the provision of technically
complete but neutral information may not be very helpful.
In the case of durable goods information cannot be gathered by trial and error.
Where the potential harms from a product feature are serious and where the
technical difficulty of evaluating information is very great, regulation may be the
best alternative despite its inefficiencies.
Uncertainty and information costs impede the ability of market transactions to yield
desirable results in case of occupational health hazards.
High information costs and large uncertainty can also impede the efficiency of
market transactions when individuals or firms confront heavy long-term
investments.
Where the side effects of private transactions have common impact on many
people, the possibility of purely private action is severely limited.
It is the combination of high transaction cost and free rider problems that makes it
necessary for government itself to arrange for the production of certain kinds of
goods and services.
Under purely voluntary arrangements there would be no incentive for any one
individual to pay his share costs, since he would receive the benefits anyway.
Efficiency argues for certain types of joint action and joint financing by several
levels of government.
Centralized decision-making necessarily homogenizes local differences in needs
and preferences, and so also fails the test of efficiency
Public policy: the effort to affect private activity by regulation, and the effort to
influence state and local governments by detailed grant programs.
Regulation
One broad class of market failure stems from the inability of the unaided private
market to put a price on important side effects of economic transactions and so to
subject them to the efficiency calculus that balances costs against gains.
Public policy starts from the conclusion that regulation is the obvious answer.
Relying on regulations rather than economic incentives to deal with highly complex
areas of behavior has built-in dynamic that inevitably broadens the scope of the
regulations.
Social intervention becomes a race between the ingenuity of the regulatee and the
loophole closing of the regulator, with a continuing expansion in the volume of
regulations as the outcome.
Capital gains
Direct federal public works or federal construction grants to state and local
governments are a favorite device for handling some kinds of market failure.
One if the problems that characterize many of these categorical grants reflects a
lack of correspondence between the nature of the grant and the “market” failure it
was supposed to correct.
Both equity and efficiency call for a more complete federalization of these
programs. The principal reform would be to place more choice directly in the hands
of individuals.
Social intervention often fails, because in other ways it ignores the role of property
structured economic incentives for achieving social goals. Another is the failure to
recognize how existing institutions channel private economic activity in the wrong
direction.
Distorted pricing and incentives play a major role in creating urban problems.
11.Stiglitz Cap 9.
La curva de costo marginal muchas veces solo incluye el costo privado, pero
cuando se toma en cuenta la externalidad negativa que esta causando, el costo
marginal social aumenta( desplaza la curva a la izquierda) disminuyendo la
cantidad socialmente optima.
I. INTRODUCTION
The purpose of this essay is to survey the emerging theory of the rent seeking
society.
Such excess returns (positive and negative) are typically viewed as short-lived
(quasi rents) because competition will drive them to normal level.
2) Artificially
Ex. Government action
The analytical fiction of these rents as a pure transfer vanishes because resourses
spent in the pursuit of a transfer are wasted from society's point of view.
The theory of rent seeking involves the study of how people compete for artificially
contrived transfers. There are two elements:
1)Normative rent seeking theory, refers to the specification and estimation of the
costs of rent-seeking activities in the economy.
2) Positive rent seeking theory, explains the sources of contrived rents in a society.
Tries to explain why some sectors of the economy are sheltered and some not.
This analysis concerns the issue of how costly such activities are to the economy.
Herberger's analysis: The welfare cost is the lost consumer surplus given by ABC.
His results showed the welfare loss from monopoly to be a negligible proportion
(less than 1 percent) of GNP. That means monopoly is not an overwhelming social
problem.
Competitive rent seeking implies that the monopoly rents PmP ( or AB) are
dissipated. Therefore, in the competitive rent seeking model, the analyst must
estimate the area of a trapezoid rather than just a triangle.
Such costs constitute 3% of GNP (more than the 1% given by herberger).
Rent seeking analysis tends to magnify the problem of monopoly over the
measurements made by herberger.
In the presentation of the welfare costa of monopoly, the consumer's role is entirely
passive: define consumers as an unorganized, widely dispersed group without
incentive to restrain the monopolization process.
The propose is to demonstrate that the tools on which these Studies are
founded(welfare costs of monopolies and tariffs) produce an
underestimation of the welfare costs.
Statics
analysis the cost for having an externality that affects the price is in the
theory described as transfer and a cost in welfare, nevertheless there are
costs that are ignored.
THEFT equilibrium
Thief will invest in how to steal, and you will invest on how to prevent this.
This will leads to an equilibrium, however this equilibrium will be extremely
costly to the society in spite of the fact that the activity of theft only involves
transfer. A solution for this problem is the establishment of public security,
the question to be made now is if the public security is more efficient that
private security.
The total cost of theft is the sum of the efforts invested in the activity of
theft, private protection against it, public investment in police protection.
The Theft itself is pure transfer, and was no welfare cost, but the existence
of theft as a potential activity results in a very substantial diversion of
resources.
Entrepreneurs should be willing to invest resources in attempts to form a
monopoly until the marginal cost equal the properly discounted term ( VPN)
The problem of identifying and measuring these resources is a difficult.
Starting that the activity is illegal and to track the resources that are
diversified in companies that have no relation with the monopoly.
Lectura 7.
Gordon Bullock
The welfare costs of tariffs, monopolies and theft
The propose is to demonstrate that the tools on which these Studies are
founded(welfare costs of monopolies and tariffs) produce an
underestimation of the welfare costs.
Statics
analysis the cost for having an externality that affects the price is in the
theory described as transfer and a cost in welfare, nevertheless there are
costs that are ignored.
THEFT equilibrium
Thief will invest in how to steal, and you will invest on how to prevent this.
This will leads to an equilibrium, however this equilibrium will be extremely
costly to the society in spite of the fact that the activity of theft only involves
transfer. A solution for this problem is the establishment of public security,
the question to be made now is if the public security is more efficient that
private security.
The total cost of theft is the sum of the efforts invested in the activity of
theft, private protection against it, public investment in police protection.
The Theft itself is pure transfer, and was no welfare cost, but the existence
of theft as a potential activity results in a very substantial diversion of
resources.
Entrepreneurs should be willing to invest resources in attempts to form a
monopoly until the marginal cost equal the properly discounted term ( VPN)
The problem of identifying and measuring these resources is a difficult.
Starting that the activity is illegal and to track the resources that are
diversified in companies that have no relation with the monopoly.