This chapter concerns welfare measurement in economies, where the government raises revenue by means of distortionary taxation. A major issue is the treatment of (state-variable) public goods in the context of social accounting. Although the marginal value that the government attaches to a...

This paper analyzes the standard welfare economics assumption of anthropocentric welfarism, i.e., that only human well-being counts intrinsically. Alternatives where animal welfare matters intrinsically are explored theoretically, based on moral philosophical literature, and empirically where...

This paper deals with optimal income taxation under labor outsourcing and FDI. We show how the optimal income tax response to the joint effect of outsourcing and FDI depends on whether FDI is complementary with, or substitutable for, domestic labor.

This paper examines the implications of habit formation in private and public consumption for the Pareto-efficient provision of public goods, based on a two-period model with nonlinear taxation. If the public good supply is time-invariant, the presence of habit formation generally alters the...

This paper contains a fairly brief, but self-contained, version of the history of welfare economics, as well as the more modern welfare results. We introduce public goods and asymmetric information, and we hint at some of the modern mechanism design results. The paper also contains a section on...

This paper concerns redistribution and public good provision under asymmetric information, which are here ingredients of a policy-problem facing each member state (nation) of an economic federation with decentralized leadership. Each member state is assumed to have its own redistributive policy...

This paper shows how the first-best and second-best rules for optimal public good provision depend on the adaptation to private and public consumption. Adaptation in private consumption typically leads to over-provision relative to the Samuelson condition, while adaptation in public consumption...

Following the 1987 report by The World Commission on Environment and Development, the genuine saving has come to play a key role in the context of sustainable development, and the World Bank regularly publishes numbers for genuine saving on a national basis. However, these numbers are typically...

Following the 1987 report by The World Commission on Environment and Development, the genuine saving has come to play a key role in the context of sustainable development, and the World Bank regularly publishes numbers for genuine saving on a national basis. However, these numbers are typically...

Much evidence suggests that people are concerned with their relative consumption, i.e., their consumption in relation to the consumption of others. Yet, the social costs of conspicuous consumption have so far played little (or no) role in savings-based indicators of sustainable development. The...