The value of a statistical life (VSL) is a very controversial topic, but one which is essential to the optimization of governmental decisions. Indeed, our society faces any number of risks (health, transportation, work, etc.) and, as resources are limited, their complete elimination is...

Ranking development programs using integrals of discounted utilities can yield drastic consequences that offend our sense of justice. New alternative social welfare criteria should be considered. A reaction to discounted utilitarianism is to moderate its effects by adding to the social welfare...

We propose a new criterion which reflects both the concern for welfare (utility) and the concern for rights in the evaluation of economic development paths. The concern for rights is captured by a pre-ordering over combinations of thresholds (floors or ceilings on various quantitative...

We show in this paper that the growth rate of the Sen index is multi-decomposable, that is, decomposable simultaneously by groups and income sources. The multi-decomposition of the poverty growth yields respectively: the growth rate of the poverty incidence (poverty rate) decomposed by groups,...

Assessments of social welfare do not usually take into account population sizes. This can lead to serious social evaluation flaws, particularly in contexts in which policies can affect demographic growth. We develop in this paper a little-known though ethically attractive approach to correcting...

Four axioms are introduced in order to characterize the family of pair-based decomposable inequality measures, which is embraced in the class of weakly decomposable inequality measures. Three axioms, namely, normalization by pairs, aggregation by pairs, and decomposition by pairs enable the...

Income mobility is often thought to equalize permanent incomes and thereby to improve social welfare. The welfare analysis of mobility often fails, however, to account for the cost of the variability of periodic incomes around permanent incomes. This paper assesses the net welfare benefit of...

The federal government announced in its 2012 budget its intention to delay the age of eligibility for Old Age Security and the Guaranteed Income Supplement from 65 to 67 years. By the time the policy is fully implemented (i.e., in 2030), this delay will have increased net revenues of the fedral...

The evaluation of development processes and of public policies often involves comparisons of social states that differ in income distributions, population sizes and life longevity. This may require social evaluation principles to be sensitive to the quality, the quantity and the duration of...

Income mobility is often thought to equalize permanent incomes and thereby to improve social welfare. The welfare analysis of mobility often fails, however, to account for the cost of the variability of periodic incomes around permanent incomes. This paper assesses the net welfare benefit of...