Property Rights, State Structures, and International Cooperation

The protection and enforcement of property rights both at the national and international levels is mostly taken for granted so that the importance of this issue for the smooth flow of international transactions is not always fully realized. One has to remember that about 200 years ago, large scale piracy still constituted a major impediment to international trade, and that both internal and inter-country commerce were unsafe due to the presence of bandits on the highways. Moreover little protection was available for what we call now intellectual property. Today the discussions and controversies surrounding the Internet where neither transactions nor intellectual property rights are yet completely safe are there to remind us of the importance of this question. It is remarkable that international cooperation in terms of the current trade regime has managed to achieve enough protection of property rights to insure relatively smooth trade flows. As the previous example of the Internet or the emergence of new trades in more complex financial instruments and new rights (such as for instance emission trading) shows, a safe future for such transactions is far from guaranteed. This paper intends on the one hand to emphasize the importance of the proper attribution and then protection of property rights at the international level to insure a continuous flow of international transactions. On the other hand, the paper also wants to draw attention to the problems associated with the recognition and protection of property rights when productive processes under the influenced of new opportunities and technologies show increasing returns to scale. More generally however, the paper also intends to stress the importance of cooperative processes in shaping state structures and ultimately the international system.