LYCOS RETRIEVER 
Welfare Economics: Results
built 276 days ago
Welfare economics is incomplete as it analyzes preferences without going on to analyze welfare (or happiness) which is the ultimate objective. Preference and welfare may differ due to imperfect knowledge, imperfect rationality, and/or a concern for the welfare of others (non-affective altruism). Imperfection in knowledge and rationality has a biological basis and the resulting accumulation instinct amplifies with advertising-fostered consumerism to result in a systematic materialistic bias. Such a bias, in combination with relative-income effects, environmental disruption effects, and over-estimation of the excess burden of taxation, results in the over-spending on private consumption and under-provision of public goods, and may make economic growth welfare-reducing. This is so despite the fact that growth finances the provision of public goods and disruption abatement and even if the tax rate and abatement ratio are optimized. To avoid welfare-reducing growth, disruption has to be taxed/controlled directly at low costs.
Source:
A subfield of welfare economics focused on the possibility of making social welfare judgments on the basis of national income. An increase in national income may reflect an increase in social welfare under some stringent assumptions, most conspicuously the assumption that the distribution of incomes is socially optimal. Although very restrictive, this kind of result has a lasting influence, in theory (international economics) and in practice (the salience of GDP growth in policy discussions). There exists a school of social indicators (see the Social Indicators Research journal) which fights this influence and the number of alternative indicators (of happiness, genuine progress, social health, economic well-being, etc.) has soared in the last decades (see e.g. Miringoff and Miringoff 1999, Frey and Stutzer 2002).
Source:
A GPI is an attempt to measure whether or not a country's growth, increased production of goods, and expanding services have actually resulted in the improvement of the welfare (or well-being) of the people in the country. Accordingly for example, the GPI will be zero if the increases in dollar costs of crime and pollution equal the total dollar rise in production of goods and services, all other factors being constant.
Source:
The book, WELFARE ECONOMICS AND SOCIAL CHOICE THEORY, 2nd Edition, by Allan M. Feldman and Roberto Serrano, is an admirable compact distillation of these subjects. What is remarkable is the full and careful presentation of the major results in these areas in a very elementary way, using only very simple mathematical tools with no loss of rigor in the results."
Source:
The effects of population size on economic welfare have been long discussed. There are two broad approaches: one approach asks whether population growth induces average economic gains; an alternative paradigm asks whether society is better off in aggregate, as a result of increasing population.
Source:
MORE ABOUT
Results