We characterize two different approaches to the idea of equality of opportunity. Roemer's social ordering is motivated by a concern to compensate for the effects of certain (non-responsibility) factors on outcomes. Van de gaer's social ordering is concerned with the equalization of the...

To take into account heterogeneity in a social welfare function, Ebert (1997) and Shorrocks (1995) show that the only consistent way of welfare measurement consists of either constructing an artificial distribution in which each household is weighted by the number of equivalent individuals, or...

Besley (1988) is one of the few exceptional articles containing non-welfarist optimal tax devices. Feehan(1990) reports an error in his first-best rules. The present note criticizes the fundamentals of Besley's second-best rules. These rules optimize the welfare or well-being of phantom agents...

In the spirit of Fleurbaey et al. (2001), it is tempting to introduce more reasonable lower and upper bounds in Atkinson and Bourguigon’s (1987) sequential generalized Lorenz dominance procedure. Unfortunately, our proposal leads, at best, to an average household income criterion, which is...

The incompatibility between the Pareto indifference criterion and a concern for greater equality in living standards of heterogenous populations (see, amongst others, Ebert, 1995, 1997, Ebert and Moyes, 2003 and Shorrocks, 1995) might come as a surprise, since both principles are reconcilable...

Fleurbaey, Hagneré and Trannoy (2003) develop a bounded dominance test to make robust welfare comparisons, which is intermediate between Ebert’s (1999) cardinal dominance criterion – generalized Lorenz dominance applied to household incomes, divided and weighted by an equivalence scale –...

The Pigou-Dalton principle demands that a regressive transfer decreases social welfare. In the unidimensional setting this principle is consistent, because regressivity in terms of attribute amounts and regressivity in terms of individual well-being coincide in the case of a single attribute. In...

Ok and Lambert (1999) show that one does not have to be a utilitarian to accept Atkinson and Bourguignon’s (1987) sequential generalized Lorenz dominance criterion, because the latter is also supported by a much wider class of aggregation functions. We take a minimal stance, we show that it...

ELIE can be interpreted as a minimum income scheme, financed by lump-sum taxes. It may induce social waste as individuals with a low taste for working may opt for voluntary unemployment. We simulate the magnitude of this social waste with microdata for Belgium and compare ELIE with a firstbest...

We characterize a family of r-extended generalized Lorenz dominance quasi-orderings and a family of r-Gini welfare orderings, on the basis of two allegedly "incompatible" axioms for heterogeneous welfare comparisons (Ebert, 1997, Ebert and Moyes, 2003, Shorrocks, 1995), but at the cost of either...