Articles by Partha Dasgupta

Offering an alternative to impersonal markets and coercive states, the communitarian institutions built around common property resources have looked attractive to scholars in the humanities and social sciences. Oddly, economic theory has been missing from discussions on CPRs, making it difficult to judge the status of empirical works, which, in the case of CPRs, have mainly been case studies. This paper presents a fairly complete economic theory of CPRs, identifying not only the circumstances in which communitarian institutions can function well, but also showing when these institutions could be expected to unravel. The theory also identifies an especially dark side of communitarian institutions, namely, their capacity to permit one group to exploit another within long-term relationships.

Well-Being in Poor Countries Partha Dasgupta The current consensus on ways of measuring the quality of life, the author argues, is premature because these measures are misleading. They neglect aspects of living of the most profound value to personhood. An attempt is made here to see how some of these aspects can be included in measures of well-being and a preliminary ranking of the world's poorest countries on this wider basis is provided. This new ranking is compared with those based on customary measures of living standard. Finally, the author examines whether as a matter of fact poor countries are faced with cruel choices among competing constituents of well-being.