I review the complex welfare economic issues that arise in environmental decision-making over very long periods, as in cases relating to climate change and biodiversity loss. I also consider the issues that arise in choosing a discount rate to apply to very long-run projects and indicate how...

We propose a method for cost-benefit analysis of public policies that identifies potential Pareto improvements when losers from a reform are compensated through income tax changes. Reforms are desirable when they decrease aggregate excess burden in commodity and labor markets. This condition is...

The use of equivalence scales for the measurement of inequality and social welfare poses a difficult ethical and technical dilemma. If all individuals are weighted equally while individual welfare measures are based on income or consumption per equivalent adult, then standard properties assumed...

In this paper we develop theoretical criteria and econometric methods to rank policy interventions in terms of welfare when individuals are loss-averse. The new criterion for "loss aversion-sensitive dominance" defines a weak partial ordering of the distributions of policy-induced gains and...

Some claim that `incommensurability` poses serious problems for the standard account of rationality and for the case for markets in economics. Incommensurability may indeed involve violations of basic axioms, such as completeness, transitivity and continuity. Sen`s version of the maximization...

The paper evaluates the impact of HIV/AIDS on welfare in several countries affected by the HIV/AIDS epidemic. Unlike studies focusing on the impact of HIV/AIDS on GDP per capita, we evaluate the impact of increased mortality using estimates of the value of statistical life. Our results...

Assessments of social welfare do not usually take into account population sizes. This can lead to serious social evaluation flaws, particularly in contexts in which policies can affect demographic growth. We develop in this paper a little-known though ethically attractive approach to correcting...

Amartya Sen’s impossibility of a Paretian liberal underscores the trade-off between two widely applied social principles—liberalism and Pareto-optimality: “If someone does have certain liberal values, then he [or she] may have to eschew his [or her] adherence to Pareto optimality” (Sen...

We discuss the general problem of finding fair constrained resource allocations. As criterion for fairness we propose an inequality index, termed fairness ratio, the maximization of which produces Lorenz-undominated Pareto-efficient allocations. Since the fairness ratio does not depend on the...

This chapter examines the role of altruistic motives in the economic analysis of public social transfers, both from a positive and from a normative point of view. The positive question is to know whether we can fully neglect altruistic considerations to explain the development or sustainability...