To improve the likelihood of reaching the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), or more generally to improve their social indicators, countries (or states and provinces within countries) basically have two options: increasing the inputs used to "produce" the outcomes measured by the MDGs, or...

We propose a social welfare function to evaluate a profile of income streams and compare the welfare gain of the actual profile relative to the income profile where the individual receives his first period income in each period. We derive necessary and sufficient conditions for the welfare...

In economies with competitive labour markets social policies harm employment and output. In Europe, in particular, non-competitive labour markets with trade unions, efficiency wages and/or costly search and mismatch seem more realistic. Social policies such as progressive taxation or...