This paper explores a new theoretical and empirical approach to the assessment of human well-being, relevant to current challenges of social fragmentation in the presence of globalization and technological advance. We present two indexes of well-being – solidarity (S) and agency (A) – to be...

This paper explores a new theoretical and empirical approach to the assessment of human well-being, relevant to current challenges of social fragmentation in the presence of globalization and technological advance. We present two indexes of well-being - solidarity (S) and agency (A) - to be...

Although economists have long stressed the limitations of using GDP to evaluate standards of living, the debate was recently reignited by the publication of the Stiglitz report. In 2006, the CEPII proposed an indicator incorporating certain social data items, in terms of equivalent incomes, such...

Equity in health has to be distinguished from equity in access to health care, or equity in the distribution of health care resources. We take as a working definition of health for our purposes the number of quality adjusted life years that a person may expect to enjoy over his or her lifetime....

This paper describes four mechanisms of income differentiation which generate inequalities both at national and international levels. They are: (i) Increasing returns to scale, (ii) cost of capital (interest) hidden in prices, (iii) economic rent derived from scarce natural resources, and (iv)...

This paper explains how to build Lorenz Curves for income distributions and discusses their use for inequality measurement. A short conceptual background, a step-by-step procedure and a simple numerical example illustrate how to calculate and draw Lorenz Curves. A discussion on the use of Lorenz...

This paper illustrates how Lorenz Curves can be used to identify the best income distribution on social welfare grounds, within a set of alternative income distributions generated by different policy options. After highlighting some drawbacks of using specific functional forms of the Social...

The constrained egalitarian solution of Dutta and Ray (1989) for TU-games is extended to asymmetric cases, using the notion of weight systems as in Kalai and Samet (1987,1988). This weighted constrained egalitarian solution is based on the weighted Lorenz-criterion as an inequality measure. It...

The article is concerned with understanding the impact of social preferences and wealth inequality on aggregate economic outcomes. We investigate how different manifestations of other-regarding preferences affect incentive contracts at the microeconomic level and how these in turn translate into...

We study optimal mechanisms for a utilitarian designer who seeks to assign a finite number of goods to a group of ex ante heterogeneous agents with unit demand. The agents have heterogeneous marginal utilities of money, which may naturally arise in environments where agents have different wealth...