The basic problem in poverty measurement is how to weigh the income of different groups. This is a normative problem on which people differ in opinion, and hence we should seek a way of dealing with the issue that takes into account this plurality. In the paper, we suggest an approach to poverty...

We evaluate the costs of three different programs for alleviating long term poverty: (i) workfare, or grants made contingent on a work requirement, (ii) universal welfare, or unconditional grants, and (iii) meanstested welfare, or grants conditioned on private labor market earnings. We identify...

This paper discusses the problems involved in considering competition policy as a separate area of economic policy. Two problems are given special attention. The first is the doubtful efficiency gain from enforcing competitive conditions in one industry when other industries are not operating at...

Rawls (1971,1993) suggests that interpersonal comparisons of well-being should be based on a primary goods index, but it is well-known that in general this approach is not compatible with the Pareto principle. This is the indexing impasse. Sen (1985,1991) argues that this is partly due to the...

In the framework of ethical social choice theory, sustainability is justified by Efficiency and Equity as ethical axioms. These axioms correspond to the Suppes-Sen Grading principle. In technologies that are productive in a certain sense, the set of Suppes-Sen maximal utility paths is shown to...

Triest (1990) argues that measuring the marginal cost of public funds (MCF) and the marginal excess burden (MEB) requires equivalent variation measures: MCF should be evaluated at consumer prices while MEB requires the use of producer prices. This paper follows up on Triest's argument by showing...

Many have questioned approaches to social choices that demand much interpersonal comparability of utility, arguing that such comparability is hard to implement in practice. In this paper, extending a result of Blackorby, Bossert, and Donaldson (1999),we prove that a very strong informational...

We generalize Hammond's characterisation of leximin by introducing a very weak two-person equity condition. In addition to strengthening the defence of the leximin principle, this result is of interest from a more technical point of view. Contrary to the present understanding in the literature...