The redistributive and efficiency aspects of personal taxes are of particular interest to both economists and governments designing tax reforms. Traditionally however, the numerous analytical tools available to calculate distributional and efficiency effects of taxes and transfers are not widely...

This paper is concerned with the use of social welfare functions in evaluating changes. In particular, it considers suggestions that welfare weights to be used in comparing the gains and losses of different individuals (or other appropriate units of analysis), and a social time preference rate...