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...

It is commonplace to observe that one of the great changes of the modern age is not only that life expectancy is much longer than a century or two ago, but that there has been a radical change in the causes of death. Even in the nineteenth century, infectious disease was by far the biggest cause...

When measuring poverty over time analysts must choose the value of the income elacticity of the poverty line. The choice of this paremeter is ultimately a value judgement but this paper suggests an approach which has some empirical basis. Borrowing from the life-style and deprivation approach to...

Results from poverty studies are sensitive to the choice f the poverty line. Poverty dominance analysis uses stochastic dominance to provide rankings of distributions in terms of poverty which are not sensitive to the choice of poverty lines or which at least give an unambiguous results over a...

Just as the courts must consider the tradeoff between the best interest of the child and parental rights in involuntary termination of parental rights, policy on international adoption must consider the tradeoffs between the best interest of the child and the long-term interests of the nation....