The "new politics of the welfare state", the term coined by Pierson (1996) to differentiate between the popular politics of welfare expansion and the unpopular politics of retrenchment, emphasizes a number of factors that distinguish countries in their capacity to pursue contentious measures and...

Following a methodology proposed by Dalton (1920) and further developed by Atkinson (1970), among others, we evaluate whether the changes in Mexico's income distribution during 1984-2008 have meant meaningful changes in its population social welfare. Inequality indexes were estimated under...

In the context of Social Welfare and Choquet integration, we briefly review, on the one hand, the generalized Gini welfare functions and inequality indices for populations of n=2 individuals, and on the other hand, the Mobius representation framework for Choquet integration, particularly in the...

When is one distribution (of income, consumption, or some other economic variable) more equal or better than another? This question has proven difficult to answer in situations where distribution functions intersect and no unambiguous ranking can be attained without introducing weaker criteria...

For many countries the Industrial Revolution was an opportunity for a dynamic economic development, but it was accompanied by deep social changes. Inequali-ties between regions have deepened, pollution has increased and also conjunctural fluctuations have intensified. In contemporary view at the...

The socially optimal allocation has been regarded to be unspecifiable because of utility’s interpersonal incomparability, Arrow’s general possibility theorem, and other factors. This paper examines this problem by focusing not on the social welfare function but instead on the utility...

This paper examines the socially optimal allocation by focusing not on the social welfare function but instead on the utility possibility frontier in exogenous growth models with a heterogeneous population. A unique balanced growth path was found on which all of the optimality conditions of all...

This paper discusses both social welfare and social choice using Arrow’s impossibility theorem for multi-profile preference case and two versions of it for single-profile preference case. Between these two versions first one assumes a two-individual society and the second one, which is similar...

Productivity data on the business sector, which covers around 75% of the economy, provide important information on the evolution of living standards. The data on multifactor productivity (MFP) growth and labor productivity growth produced by the official statistical agency in Canada (Statistics...

The goal of this paper is to compare the well-being of young children in Canada, Norway and the United States. Many economic models focus on children's eventual well-being by adopting an investment perspective. While this is important, children's well-being today should also count when we assess...