rent seeking

rent seeking, competition for politically protected transfers of wealth.

The typical rent-seeking scenario includes an economic rent, or “prize,” and a set of actors that create, capture, and finance the prize. The government creates the prize by setting, for example, a public subsidy, an import license, or a monopoly protected by legal entry barriers. Interest groups struggle to influence the government and thereby capture the prize, a contest that may include lobbying, public-relations campaigns, and bribery of government officials. Unorganized segments of the public complete the rent-seeking picture, for they are the actors from whom resources are extracted to finance the prize, via taxes or higher monopolistic prices.

Economic research on rent seeking has focused on both its causes and its consequences.

Analyses of the causes of rent seeking have traditionally classified political decisions based on their relative costs and benefits for winners (actors that capture or benefit from the prize) and losers (actors that finance the prize). Governments are more likely to create political prizes and induce rent seeking when such prizes involve (1) large benefits for a small well-organized interest group and (2) small costs for a large number of consumers or taxpayers in the unorganized public. In such a case, for each consumer or taxpayer, the costs of organizing an interest group to eliminate the prize would outweigh the benefits of eliminating the prize. Conversely, the creation of prizes is less likely when potential losers are well organized and must bear a high individual cost, while potential winners lack organization and must broadly share the benefits of the prize.

Because the creation of prizes depends on the political configuration of winners and losers, levels of rent seeking correspondingly vary across policy realms and countries. A further insight is that the decision to establish the political prize—not just the competition for it—is a rent-seeking activity, thus including politicians as rent seekers.

Rent seeking typically produces major social problems, including decreased economic output. Pioneering work by economists has shown that, by inducing interest groups to fight for prizes, the creation of economic rents causes a dissipation of resources that is potentially more serious than the waste associated with the rent itself. Groups struggling for the prize invest time and money in the transfer of wealth rather than in the creation of wealth.

The policy implications of that research are clear. Reallocating resources from rent seeking to productive activities should result in a greater economic output, which in theory would benefit at least some people while harming no one. Such an analysis provides a theoretical justification for pro-market reforms, such as those that were implemented in both rich and poor countries in the 1980s and ’90s. However, pro-market reforms in eastern Europe and Latin America have shown that the process of privatization and trade liberalization can generate an avalanche of rent-seeking activities among formerly protected groups rushing to control the positions abandoned by the state.