Hrabrin Bashev
To the Question of Economic Study of Agrarian Contracts
Summary:
Arround the globe, a huge number of theoretical and empirical studies and publications related to agrarian contracts of various types have been made. In Bulgaria, the studies of economic contracts in general, and of agrarian contracts in particular, are incidental, with individual researchers applying "their own" definitions and methodologies, which are often contradictory, non-comprehensive and highly debatable. The article attempts to answer several important academic and practical questions: what is an economic contract, what is the difference of the economic approach compared to other (legal, sociological, etc.) approaches to the study of contracts, what is the role of economic contracts in agrarian governance, why there is such a huge variety of contracts used by agents, etc. The achievements of the interdisciplinary New Institutional Economics are adapted and a holistic framework for the economic understanding and analysis of agrarian contracts and contractual relations in agriculture is presented. The system of agrarian contracts is seen as a complex, networked and multi-layered system, involving a variety of agrarian and non-agrarian Agents, who govern their relations and activities through various contractual Means (types of contracts), participating in the agrarian contractual Process, as a result of which in each particular time period in a given country, region, sub-sector, type of farming, agro-ecosystem, etc. dominates a certain contractual and governance Order. Like the economic analysis of the system of agrarian governance, the holistic analysis of the system of economic contracts is to apply an A-M-P-O approach, which includes an analysis of all its elements - Agents, Means, Process, and Order. The article offers an adequate economic definition of agrarian contracts and characterization of their place in the system of agrarian governance as bilateral or multilateral agreements related to agricultural production and services. After that, an economic characterization of the agents participating in the contractual relations is made, paying particular attention to their bounded rationality and tendency to opportunism. These two characteristics related to "human nature" are the reason for the existence of transaction costs and the need to choose an effective governing (contractual) form to increase the "rationality" of agents and protect against possible opportunism in their relationships.
