Productivity data on the business sector, which covers around 75% of the economy, provide important information on the evolution of living standards. The data on multifactor productivity (MFP) growth and labor productivity growth produced by the official statistical agency in Canada (Statistics...

The goal of this paper is to compare the well-being of young children in Canada, Norway and the United States. Many economic models focus on children's eventual well-being by adopting an investment perspective. While this is important, children's well-being today should also count when we assess...

Productivity data on the business sector, which covers around 75% of the economy, provide important information on the evolution of living standards. The data on multifactor productivity (MFP) growth and labor productivity growth produced by the official statistical agency in Canada (Statistics...

If a nation's economic performance improves, how much extra happiness does that buy its citizens? Most public debate assume -without real evidence- that the answer is a lot. This paper examines the question by using information on the well-being in Western countries.

This paper examines the change in welfare in IReland over the 1987-1994 period by investigating whether Lorenz and Generalised Lorenz dominance can be observed for household expenditure data. It also calculated bootstrapped standard error measures for Lorenz and Generalised Lorenz curves and...

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) means-tested welfare, or grants conditioned on private labor market earnings. We identify...

This paper describes a method of estimating the welfare effects of a set of price changes, using money measures of welfare change such as compensating and equivalent variations, and the associated concept of "equivalent income".

Both common sense and historical examples suggest that resource scarcity causes appro- priative con ict as people struggle with each other to avoid hunger and starvation. But, economic intuition, also supported by historical examples, suggests that resource abundance, by giving people more to...

There is no consensus on how to measure interpersonally comparable, cardinal utility. Despite of this, people repeatedly make welfare evaluations in their everyday lives. However, people do not always agree on such evaluations, and this is one important reason for political disagreements. Thus,...

According to Chateauneuf (1996), we compare some inequality criteria. We investigate their properties and characteristics. Then, following the approach that links different levels of deprivation with alternative values of social welfare, we look for a functional that evaluates the well-being of...