文档介绍：The Portuguese Civil Code and the colonia tenancy contract in Madeira
(1867–1967)
BENEDITA CÂMARA (University of Madeira, Portugal)
INTRODUCTION
A long tradition among economists, dating back to the eighteenth century, argued that sharecropping was both inefficient and However, in 1969 Steven N. S. Cheung challenged this view. The new institutional economics literature reviewed the premises of neoclassical thought – perfect rationality and the petitive Empirical work inspired by the economics of development and by economic history paid attention to the imperfections in the market and argued for an optimistic view with regard to sharecropping contracts, based on the argument that these contracts reduced both parties’ transaction costs. A more moderate form of this view was put forward by some authors. It was considered to be valid for traditional agriculture, but was questioned in cases where the contracts did not adapt to economic development due, for instance, to increases in capital inputs and the growing opportunity costs of agricultural In general terms, empirical studies have shown that it is difficult to define and fix a general structure for contracts since this structure was diverse and changeable, the most promising variables explaining the recorded changes in the contractual mix over time and space having been shown to be ‘proxies representing the cost of contracting’.4
From a different standpoint, analysis of economic property rights – as opposed to legal property rights – is based on the study of contracts because they reallocate rights among contracting parties. Economic property rights, since they were considered neither absolute nor constant, pletely related to transaction costs. Transaction costs are to be understood as the costs of transfer, capture and protection of rights while this concept, within the theory of contracts, includes those costs which are wholly borne by the owner of the land, such as costs of su