We consider social insurance schemes with a two-part benefit formula: a flat (constant) term and a variable term which is proportional to individuals' contributions. The factor of proportionality defines the type of social insurance. We adopt a two-stage political economy approach. At the first,...

This paper addresses the issue of optimum population with two concerns : avoiding both the absolute repugnant solution that amounts to giving to an infinite number an infinitesimal amount and the marginal repugnant solution in which equilibrium consumption decresases with income. To avoid these...

According to Chateauneuf (1996), we compare some inequality criteria. We investigate their properties and characteristics. Then, following the approach that links different levels of deprivation with alternative values of social welfare, we look for a functional that evaluates the well-being of...

This paper offers a rationale for the development of the barter industry in industrialized economies. It argues that, in a context of imperfect competition, barter represents a profitable and efficient system of exchange. Thanks to barter, even if already at the optimum, a monopolist can still...

Inequalities in health and health care are caused by different factors. Measuring "unfair"inequalities implies that a distinction is introduced between causal variables leading toethically legitimate inequalities and causal variables leading to ethically illegitimateinequalities. An example of...

In a model where agents have unequal production skills and different preferences, we build social welfare functions which rely only on ordinal non-comparable information on individual preferences. Social welfare functions are required to satisfy properties of compensation for inequalities in...

In this paper we exploit global analysis to explore welfare properties of a standard one-commodity GEI, under different notions of constrained Pareto optimality. In a unifying framework we revise and extend some of the leading results of the literature on incomplete markets and government...