There is no consensus on how to measure interpersonally comparable, cardinal utility. Despite of this, people repeatedly make welfare evaluations in their everyday lives. However, people do not always agree on such evaluations, and this is one important reason for political disagreements. Thus,...

Starting from a representative welfare function, this paper developed a simple method to endogenously specify the weights for the Human Development Index (HDI), and finds that the current equal-weighted HDI significantly biases down the weight of life expectancy. The weights proposed by this...

A review of the theoretical literature on optimal indirect taxation reveals that analytical arguments in favor of uniform indirect taxation seem weak and rather unrealistic; hence determining the optimal tax structure remains an empirical issue. However, reviewing the empirical contributions...

This paper concerns optimal emissions of greenhouse gases when catastrophic consequences are possible. A numerical model is presented which takes into account both continuous climate-feedback damages as well as the possibility of a catastrophic outcome. The uncertainty in the model concerns...

The partial revenue from each indirect tax and the total revenue from all indirect taxes on consumer goods are derived as functions of all commodity prices, the tax rates of each commodity, total expenditure and demographic variables using a complete demand system. Within this framework we...

Income-based as well as most existing multidimensional poverty indices (MPI) assume equal distribution within the household and thus are likely to lead to yield a biased assessment of individual poverty, and poverty by age or gender. In this paper we first show that the direction of the bias...

In this paper, we propose to use the so-called Sen-Shorrocks poverty index (Shorrocks, 1995) to measure multidimensional deprivation when only dichotomous variables are available to assess deprivation in the various deprivation domains, the most common case in the literature, and introduce a...

The 2007/2008 food price crisis and the following global economic recession has (temporarily) increased the number of people to suffer from hunger. While the impacts can be measured with precision only ex post, for policy makers it is critical to get a sense of likely impacts ex ante in order to...

Most existing empirical papers concerned about multidimensional poverty use the house- hold as the unit of analysis, meaning that multidimensional poverty status of the household is equated with the multidimensional poverty status of all individuals in the household. This assumption,...

In this paper, considering the overarching concern of the 2030 sustainable development agenda, "leaving no one behind", and targets 1.2 and 10.1 of the SDGs, we stress that the mainstream approach to multidimensional poverty measurement in developing countries faces some deficiencies to properly...