The traditional concept of a strict minimum of nontaxable income equal for all taxpayers embedded in most current income-tax systems is the result of a paradox of fiscal egalitarianism. The paper shows that substituting the traditional notion of a strict minimum of nontaxable income for a scheme...

All the progress made by the economists who established the theory of welfare, are based on the needs for the progress in engineering that marked out the era of the industrial revolution. All the models that go along with these theories are based on the science of engineering and contributed at...

This paper looks at the integration of regions and nations through the prism of the merger of populations (societies). The paper employs a particular index of social stress. Stylized examples of the merging of two populations suggest that with integration, the social stress index will increase....

Traditional Knowledge (TK) systems have always been integral to the survival and adaptation of human societies. Yet, they enjoy a fairly recent recognition and popularization by scientists, the media, politicians, corporates and the wider public. In this paper we present a typology of key...

When is one distribution (of income, consumption, or some other economic variable) more equal or better than another? This question has proven difficult to answer in situations where distribution functions intersect and no unambiguous ranking can be attained without introducing weaker criteria...

Destination countries are progressively shifting towards selective immigration policies. These can effectively increase migrants' average education even if one allows for endogenous schooling decisions and education policies at origin. Still, more selective immigration policies reduce social...

The present paper gives an overview of the theory of green national accounting. Three purposes of green national accounting (measurement of sustainable income, social welfare or net social profit) and two measures (Green NNP and Hicksian income) are considered. It is argued that sustainable...

This paper make straightforward extensions to Anderson's (1996) nonparametric statistical tests of stochastic dominance criteria to bivariate distributions. These test are applied to a time series of cross-section datasets on household level total expenditure and non labour market time in the UK.

This article evaluates the main effects for the Brazilian economy from the creation of a free trade zone among the BRICS economies. A welfare analysis suggests the Chinese economy to be the closest - in comparison to the remaining BRICS - to the definition of a natural trade partner for Brazil....

Gender based taxation (GBT) has been recently proposed as a promising policy in order to improve women's status in the labour market and within the family. We use a microeconometric model of household labour supply in order to evaluate, with Italian data, the behavioural and welfare effects of...