The paper provides estimates of global relative poverty trends from 1970 onwards. Relative poverty is shown to have decreased significantly, but at the same time there has been a worsening poverty outcome among up to one billion of the world's poorest citizens. The paper also proposes a...

The authors' approach to the ethical and political aspects of inter-temporal interactions is the following: 1) Two representative agents Ra and Râ are analyzed and asymmetries in their wealth and voting powers are dealt with by a the text-book tool of a welfare function - its intra and...

Lucas (2004) asserts that "Of the tendencies that are harmful to sound economics, the most seductive, and in my opinion the most poisonous, is to focus on questions of distribution... The potential for improving the lives of poor people by finding different ways of distributing current...

Growth is pro-poor if the poverty measure of interest falls. This implies three potential sources of pro-poor growth: (a) a high rate of growth of average incomes; (b) a high sensitivity of poverty to growth in average incomes; and (c) a poverty-reducing pattern of growth in relative incomes. I...

Whereas the economics discipline possesses a highly refined theoretical apparatus to analyze the effects of government behaviour on the economy, it has not (yet) managed to fully develop a positively formulated "economic theory of politics" that would permit the integration of the...

Amartya Sen has developed the so-called capability approach to meet the criticism that income alone may be insufficient as a measure of economic inequality. This is because knowledge about people’s income does not tell us what they are able to acquire with that income. For example, people with...

Climate policy recommendations differ widely because of disagreements over what discount rates to use. Disagreement reduces the impact of economic models and signals a need for improved methodology. The problem is related to the choice of intergenerational welfare functions. A first...

This paper intends to analyze some macroeconomic aspects in the framework of the Optimal Taxation Theory. First of all Optimal Taxation filiation will be considered in studying the three functions of the state described in Musgrave's work. The collective book published in 1994, and entitled...

We analyze normatively determined distributions of language rights in multilingual settings. It is shown in a welfare-maximizing model where rights today influence the status of a language in the future, that the “naïve” ex ante cost-benefit analysis has to be augmented in various...

The paper analyses alternative investment policies and their consequences for the evolution of human capital in Europe based on a model of age dependent skill formation where the life span depends on investments during childhood. What makes the approach special is the analysis of the returns to...