![]() ![]() These systems, for energy, water, transport, communication, waste, and myriad other collective goods, sit at the interface of ecosystems and human settlements, and their design and operation are thus central to the path-dependent relationship humans have with the natural environment. Top of pageġ Our systems of infrastructure exist as vast networks of investment that underpin the urbanization of the landscape. If applied to measure and remedy the costs of disturbances over time, transaction cost economic methodologies may form the basis for evaluating infrastructure projects for resilience, opening the possibility of recognizing economic and environmental co-benefits in infrastructure investments. Evaluations of infrastructure investments today should take account of the cost of repeated cycles of investment and collapse over the long term. Buildings and infrastructure are designed to tolerate a limited set of disturbances when stressed beyond those limits, structures are subject to degradation and collapse. In contrast, we build things that are static, standardized, and unable to adapt to either forces of nature or deliberate acts of destruction. ![]() ![]() Notions of resilience express the idea that the natural world is dynamic, highly specific, and ever-changing. Resilience theory provides a framework for applying analytical techniques to anticipate the effects of disturbances. Organizing research around comparative production and transaction costs, instead of price, creates an opportunity to internalize externalities, such as ecosystem services, into ex post evaluations of historical investment and ex ante analyses of alternative future development plans. Research designs in transaction cost analysis are comparative, emphasizing the accumulated costs over time of one approach compared to another. Transaction cost theory was formulated to explain the economics of concessions and other forms of organization for delivering infrastructure goods and services. Transaction cost economics is a theory and methodology for comparatively evaluating the cost-effectiveness of institutional arrangements governing transactions. The Business History Seminar has been made possible by financial support from the Erasmus Research Institute of Management (ERIM) and the Vereniging Trustfonds Erasmus Universiteit Rotterdam.In a step toward more economic and environmentally sustainable decision-making, this paper introduces transaction cost economics as a promising paradigm for revealing the cost-effectiveness of resilient infrastructure investments. This episode teaches us about the costs of Soviet secrecy and raises basic questions about its purposes. For some months in 19, the Gulag's camp chiefs and central administrators struggled with this dilemma without achieving a resolution. As this secret was guarded more and more closely, the camps began to drop out of the Soviet economic universe, losing the ability to share necessary information and do business with civilian persons and institutions without disclosing a state secret: their own location. ![]() One of the Gulag's most important secrets was the location of its labour camps, scattered across the length and depth of the Soviet Union. The official rationale of secrecy was defense against external enemies. The Soviet state had entered its most secretive phase. In 1949 the Cold War was picking up momentum. ![]()
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