A General Approach to Welfare Measurement through National Income Accounting*

A framework is developed for analyzing national income accounting using a revealed welfare approach that is sufficiently general to cover, both the standard discounted utilitarian and maximin criteria as special cases. We show that the basic welfare properties of comprehensive national income accounting, previously ascribed only to the discounted utilitarian case, extend to this more general framework. In particular, under a wider range of circumstances, it holds that real NNP growth (or, equivalently, a positive value of net investments) indicates welfare improvement. We illustrate the applicability of our approach in the Dasgupta–Heal–Solow model of capital accumulation and resource depletion.     

Global welfare comparisons

Abstract To provide a normative foundation for transfers between different economies, one needs information on their ‘per capita welfare.’ This paper considers various methods for doing this and reaches the following conclusions: (i) Such global welfare comparisons are more demanding than usually thought. (ii) The ranking of methods differs from that of local (over‐time) comparisons, with real comprehensive per capita NNP being the least impractical method. The lesson is that global welfare comparisons should be performed with great care. The comparisons must be made in local real prices calculated according to ‘purchasing‐power‐parity,’ where non‐traded environmental amenities play an important role.     

External balance,dynamic efficiency,and the welfare effects of unilateral and multilateral permit policies in interdependent economies

This paper investigates domestic and foreign welfare effects of unilateral and multilateral permit policies in a two-country overlapping generations model with producer carbon emissions. We show that the welfare effects of a more stringent cap on emissions depend on the external balance of the policy implementing country, the dynamic (in)efficiency of the world economy, and the preference for environmental quality. Under dynamic efficiency, the global welfare loss of policy implementation in a net foreign creditor country is lower than of a policy in the net foreign debtor country. Moreover, although the country which has unilaterally implemented a permit policy would gain from a multilateral policy, the associated welfare loss for the other country is larger than that of a unilateral policy abroad.     

Union Wage Setting and Capital Income Taxation in Dynamic General Equilibrium

This paper concerns the effects of capital income taxation in a dynamic general equilibrium framework with union wage setting, when households face taxes related to both labor and capital. One purpose is to characterize the general equilibrium solution. Another is to study the effects of increased capital income taxation – in terms of the responses in real wages, employment, capital stock, output and consumption – and relate these behavioral responses to the overall tax structure. We also derive a cost–benefit rule for the purpose of analyzing the welfare effects of a small shift from labor income taxation to capital income taxation.     

WELFARE ECONOMICS AND THE MEASUREMENT OF NNP*

Some relationships between NNP and economic welfare are explored in the confines of a simple, static welfare maximization model. Various assumptions concerning both the measurement of NNP and the economic system underlying this model are dropped seriatem and the implications for the correspondence between NNP and economic welfare are examined. The following conclusions emerge. There are several classes of resource reorganization in which NNP and welfare move in the same direction, so that NNP can serve as an ordinal proxy for welfare. These include changes in taxes or competitive imperfections which result in product substitution and movements along the transformation function. With a general qualification, NNP-welfare correspondence is preserved for allocative changes which affect the real costs and prices of goods included in NNP or of non-included goods in inelastic demand; changes in involuntary unemployment; and changes in technological externalities affecting producers. There are other cases where changes in NNP and welfare are not positively correlated. Included here are changes in real costs of non-included goods for which demand is elastic and changes in technological externalities imposed on consumers.     

税制改革、经济效率和社会福利——基于A-KOLG框架下的动态CGE模拟分析

在经典的世代交叠动态一般均衡(A-K OLG)模型的基础上,建立了一个由一系列不等式方程组所构成的"跨期动态"模型,反现实地模拟了提高间接税同时降低直接税对我国社会福利、经济效率的影响。与基期相比,减少对资本征税会带来福利增长0.34%(纯经济效率提高0.25%),减少对劳动征税会带来福利增长0.1%(纯经济效率提高0.02%)。该实证结果证明了间接税比直接税更有利于实现经济效率的理论观点。因此,提高直接税的比重是需要以一定的经济效率损失为代价的,实行该项举措应该权衡好各方面利弊、把握好改革时机。     

Well-being and/or quality of life in EU countries through a multidimensional index of sustainability

The aim of my paper is to demonstrate that Sen's theory of well-being can be applied to make the concept of sustainable human development operational through the building of a multidimensional index of sustainability which takes into account, at the same time, economic, social and environmental variables. This index may be considered an alternative to the current measures of welfare/sustainability since not only conventional measures such as GDP, but also multi-attribute indices, such as Human Development Index (HDI), Genuine Savings, Index of Sustainable Economic Welfare (ISEW) etc., are found to be inadequate to make the concept of sustainable development operational. Therefore, the limitations of these measures of welfare/sustainability justify the search for a new index of sustainability. This index will show, at the operational level, how Sen's theory of well-being can be useful to sustainable development. It was applied to EU countries using the standardised deviation methodology being the closest and most suitable methodology to be adopted for building multidimensional indices. The factor analysis methodology will also be used in my paper. Lastly, the comparison between Sen's trend of sustainability and GDP trend index number-which are both of them applied to Italy-will show how much the criticisms and the limitations directed towards the indicator of GDP are founded.     

ON OUTPUT OF THE SWEDISH EDUCATION SECTOR: ADDITIONAL REMARKS

The main purpose of this paper is to relate the empirical attempt of measuring output from the education sector to theoretical results about the welfare significance of an extended net national product (NNP) measure. We show that economic theory provides a more focused way of interpreting such output estimates, which has not been recognized in previous studies. The paper also contains new estimates of the output from the Swedish education sector.     

A Class of Social Welfare Functions That Depend on Mean Income and Income Polarization

A well‐established strategy for evaluating alternative income distributions is based on the use of an abbreviated social welfare function that depends only on mean income and an inequality index. In keeping with this literature, we study the existence of social welfare functions that can be written as a trade‐off between efficiency and income polarization. This paper proposes a class of social welfare functions consistent with the Esteban and Ray, and Duclos, Esteban and Ray income polarization indices. For this result, we expand the domain for personal preferences to incorporate not only own income but also the well‐being of others. In addition, we link our proposal to the literature on relative satisfaction. The approach is illustrated by an empirical application using the CPS database for the United States in the period 1991–2010.     

A dynamic general equilibrium model of pollution abatement under learning by doing

In 2013, Beladi et al. constructed a dynamic general equilibrium model of pollution, and characterized a steady-state equilibrium. In this paper, we extend Beladi et al.’s model to an even more general model in which the pollution abatement costs under learning by doing are taken into account. In our model, the instantaneous abatement costs depend on both the rate of abatement and the experience of using a technology. Our objective is to apply optimal control theory to investigate the dynamic general equilibrium model of pollution abatement, and derive the steady-state equilibrium properties and optimal levels of emission permits and pollution treatment.     

Carbon tax simulations using a household demand model

The main objective of this paper is to analyse consumer response and welfare effects due to changes in energy or environmental policy. To achieve this objective we formulate and estimate an econometric model for non-durable consumer demand in Sweden that utilises micro- and macro-data. In the simulations, we consider two revenue neutral scenarios that both imply a doubling of the CO₂ tax; one that returns the revenues in the form of a lower VAT and one that subsidise public transport. One conclusion from the simulations is that the CO₂ tax has regional distribution effects, in the sense that household living in sparsely populated areas carry a larger share of the tax burden.     

Why Some Firms Train Apprentices and Many Others Do Not

Abstract. The latest study investigating the cost–benefit ratio of apprenticeship training for Swiss companies has shown that most apprentices offset the cost of their training during their apprenticeship on the basis of the productive contribution of the work they perform. Given this outcome, it is worth investigating why so many firms choose not to train apprentices. Maximum-likelihood selection models were used to estimate the net cost of training for firms without an apprenticeship programme. The models show, firstly, that non-training firms would incur significantly higher net cost during the apprenticeship period if they would switch to a training policy and, secondly, that this less favourable cost–benefit ratio is determined less by cost than by absence of benefit. For the apprenticeship system as such the results indicate that, as long as training regulations and the market situation permit a cost-effective training of apprentices, companies do not need specific labour market regulations or institutions to offer training posts. In this respect, the Swiss findings might be of interest for the ongoing German discussion about the expected repercussions of a more general labour market deregulation on the apprenticeship training system.     

Adjusted net saving and welfare change

The World Bank has estimated Adjusted net (or genuine) saving (ANS) as a macro level index of sustainable development. ANS extends the conventional net saving by adding human capital accumulation and deducting natural resources losses. This paper tests ANSas an index of sustainable development. It examines whether ANS explains changes in welfare. Welfare is measured by Infant mortality rate (IMR) and Human Development Index (HDI). The study was conducted in 36 selected developing and developed countries and covers the period 1971-2000. The results suggest a positive and significant relationship between Adjusted net saving and aggregate welfare but weak in magnitude.     

Microfinance and gender empowerment

In this paper, we develop a theoretical model of household production, bargaining and credit to analyse how access to microcredit affects intra-household decision-making and welfare, and identify conditions under which female household members are most likely to benefit. We show that, consistent with ethnographic accounts of the impact of microcredit programmes on poor households, access to loans can lead to a variety of outcomes for intra-household decision-making and welfare depending on initial conditions and that, in some instances, women borrowers may experience a decline in welfare. We identify two instances in which a woman is most likely to benefit: when there is scope for investing the loan profitably in a joint activity, and when a large share of the household budget is devoted to household public goods.     

The economic rate of return of infrastructures and regional policy in the European Union

This paper examines the results of cost–benefit analysis (CBA) of 200 major investment projects co-financed in 1988–93 by the European Commission. The project database we have built is probably one of the few existing sets of comparable micro-data on the expected rates of return of public infrastructure and on the quality of CBA leading to its calculation. The database reveals a striking dispersion of expected rates of return around the average. Part of the large sample variance is probably a consequence more of inconsistencies in the actual implementation of CBA than of structural differences among the European Union's more economically backward regions. We offer a measurement of the quality of CBA and compare EU ex-ante data with World Bank ex-post data.     

Optimal Forestry Contracts under Asymmetry of Information

In this paper, I analyze optimal royalty contracts in forestry when the harvesting firm has private information on the cost of harvesting. This infinite horizon forest rotation model with asymmetry of information on the cost parameter results in a dynamic incentive problem. Depending on whether the costs are correlated over time or not, the firm either receives rent or receives no rent, associated with the continuation part of the rotation choice. I characterize the optimal contract explicitly in both cases. I also examine the loss in expected welfare surplus resulting from the use of a linear contract instead of the more general non‐linear contract.     

A Model of Reputation in Cheap Talk*

We study a dynamic game of advice where the sender's preferences are unknown to the receiver. The novel feature of the model is that there is more than one type of biased sender. We show that the more equal the proportions of different biases in the sender population, the greater the credibility of the information transmitted. Somewhat surprisingly, however, we also find that the receiver does not benefit from this equality. We discuss our results in the context of political lobbying and show that institutions that increase transparency lower lobbyists' incentives for truthtelling, but unambiguously promote the policymaker's welfare.     

Price discovery and intermediation in linked emissions trading markets: A laboratory study

Many new and proposed emissions trading systems involve multiple countries and regions. The introduction of interregional trading raises questions about how flexible state- or national-level authorities should be in allowing individual firms to trade with firms or authorities in other states or countries. This paper uses laboratory methods to evaluate the efficiency and pricing performance of linking trading across regions at the firm-to-firm level. In one treatment, individual firms trade directly with firms or authorities in other regions. We compare performance in this treatment to an intergovernmental trading treatment, where emissions trading is restricted to occur only between intermediaries. A baseline treatment of autarky, where firms only trade with other firms in their country or region, provides a benchmark to assess the efficiency benefits of allowing linking. Although efficiency and price discovery are both improved by allowing intermediation in linked permit markets, we find that further gains can be realized through direct firm to firm trading. Buyers in high cost regions and sellers in low cost regions benefit the greatest from linking.     

Price and quantity regulation in general equilibrium

We consider a general equilibrium model with a production externality (e.g. pollution), where the regulator does not observe firm productivity shocks. We examine quantity (permit) regulation and price (tax) regulation. The quantity of permits issued by the regulator are independent of the productivity shock, since shocks are unobserved. Price regulation implies use of the regulated input is an increasing function of the productivity shock because firms take advantage of a good productivity shock by increasing input use. Thus price regulation generates higher average, but more variable, production. Therefore, we show that in general equilibrium the relative advantage of quantity versus price regulation depends not only on the slopes of marginal benefits and costs, but on general equilibrium effects such as risk aversion. The general equilibrium effects are often more important than the slopes of the marginal benefits and cost curves. In the simplest model, a reasonable risk aversion coefficient implies quantity regulation generates higher welfare regardless of the benefit function.     

Estimating intergenerational distribution preferences

Resource management decisions influence not only the output of the economy but also the distribution of utility between groups within the community. The theory of cost benefit analysis provides a means of incorporating distributional changes into the decision making calculus through the application of distributional or welfare weights. However, this practice has not been widely adopted in part due to difficulties in the estimation of distributional weights. This paper addresses this problem by using the stated preference method of choice modelling to estimate distributional weights suitable for inclusion in a cost benefit analysis framework. The findings of a choice modelling experiment designed to estimate community preferences with respect to intergenerational utility distribution illustrate the potential of this method in addressing distributional issues.