How people perceive the Welfare State: a real-effort experiment

The main activity of a Welfare State is to impose taxes in order to collect money to provide services. In this paper, we want to test subjects’ perception of these two issues in the laboratory. In particular, using a real-effort experiment as a tool, we aim at measuring both the labor supply and the consensus as the level of taxation and the efficiency of the Welfare State vary. Our finding is that subjects significantly react to a change in the tax rate, while the performance of the Welfare State affects subjects’ preferences but not their labor supply.     

欧债危机与资本主义福利国家新变化

欧债危机爆发后,有一种观点认为危机的原因是高福利。通过分析希腊债务危机与本国福利制度的关系,对比南北欧在危机中的不同表现,可以看出高福利制度只是债务危机的直接推手,欧债危机的发生还有其他原因。本文通过对北欧福利国家改革的历史考察以及这次债务危机中各国财政紧缩和福利改革措施的分析,探讨福利国家改革的走向和趋势。     

Gender, Labor Markets and Welfare States

Books reviewed:
Review of Gender and the Labor Market: Econometric Evidence of Obstacles to Achieving Gender Equality , edited by Siv Gustafsson and Danièle Meulders; and Gender and the Welfare State: Care, Work and Welfare in Europe and the USA , by Mary Daly and Katherine Rake Reviewed by Martha MacDonald     

Book Reviews

Books reviewed:
Nielsen, S. B., Incentives and Redistribution in the Swedish Welfare State: The Swedish Tax Reform
Hannesson, R., Principles of Economic Growth     

Short Reviews

R ichard S aville (ed.), The Economic Development of Modern Scotland 1950-1980, Edinburgh.
M ichael B eenstock and Associates, Work, Welfare and Taxation: A Study of Labour Supply Incentives in the UK;
China's Political Economy: The Quest for Development since 1949
P eter E arl , Lifestyle Economics: Consumer Behaviour in a Turbulent World, Brighton     

Interpreting income distributions in a welfare state: The case of Sweden

It is shown in this paper that the distribution of purchasing power, and hence probably also ‘economic well-being’, in a Welfare State like Sweden is not tightly connected with the contribution of households in the production system. Moreover, economic inequality is drastically exaggerated when income statistics are not adjusted for differences in working time and in the time-profile of income over life. However, it is also shown that some important inequalities are not removed even by the very ambitious tax and Welfare State system in Sweden, and that some new inequalities are in fact introduced. The paper also tries to highlight the wide wedges which in an ‘advanced’ Welfare State are necessarily driven between factor costs for firms and factor rewards for households. All this holds in particular for annual income.     

Book Reviews

Books reviewed:
Grzegorz W., Kolodko, Post-Communist Transition: The Thorny Road
Andrzej, Kozminski and George, Yip, Strategies for Central and Eastern Europe
Vojmir, Franicevic and Milica, Uvalic, Equality, Participation, Transition Essays in Honour of Branko Horvat
Jan, Adam, Social Cost of Transformation to a Market Economy in Post-Socialist Countries; The Cases of Poland, the Czech Republic and Hungary
Irwin, Collier; Herwig, Roggemann; Oliver, Scholz and Horst, Tomann, Welfare States in Transition: East and West     

Reassessing welfare reform data: a response to cherry

Abstract

This is a response to Robert Cherry's comment on the article, “Welfare as We [Don't] Know It: A Review and Feminist Critique of Welfare Reform Research” that appeared in the 10(2) issue of Feminist Economics. This response argues that while some combination of welfare reform, the booming economy in the late 1990s, and changes in economic policy all worked together to decrease caseloads and increase employment rates among welfare leavers, these are incomplete measures of the impact of welfare reform on the lives of lone mothers. This paper also argues that the effects of welfare reform on lone mothers are more mixed than Cherry acknowledges. This paper concludes that when one holistically examines low-income lone mothers' lives, it is premature to declare welfare reform a success.     

Book Reviews

Books reviewed:
Thomas Aronsson, Per-Olov Johansson and Karl-Gustaf Löfgren, Welfare Measurement, Sustainability and Green National Accounting. A Growth Theoretical Approach
Kjell Arne Brekke, Economic Growth and the Environment — On the Measurement of Income and Welfare
Søren Pedersen (ed.), The Shadow Economy in Western Europe. Measurement and Results for Selected Countries
Knut, Wicksell, Selected Essays in Economics. Volume I     

Non-paternalistic Altruism and Utility Interdependence

This paper clarifies the notion of non-paternalistic altruism through the use of utility aggregators. It presents conditions for the existence of non-paternalistically altruistic utility functions and provides a complete characterization of such utility functions. The results are used to generalize the Second Theorem of Welfare Economics and to prove the existence of an equilibrium in a game of voluntary gift-giving.
JEL Classification Nos.: D11, D64.     

Reviews

Book reviewed in this article:
The Emergence of the Theory of the Firm from Adam Smith to Alfred Marshall. by Philip L. Williams
Trade Barriers Facing Developing Countries, by Alexander J. Yeats
The Pure Theory of International Trade and Distortions, by B. R. Hazari
The Condition of the People:Social Welfare in Australia 1900–197s. by Ronald Mendelsohn
Macro-economic Policy in Australia, 1972–1976, by Ainsley Jolley
Australia in the War (of 1939–194s:War Economy 1942–1945. by S. J. Butlin and C. B. Schedvin     

Reviews

Books reviewed:
Siobhan Austin, Culture and the Labour Market
Knox Lovell and Subal Kumbhakar, Stochastic Frontier Analysis
Geoff Harcourt, Selected Essays on Economic Police
Leonard Gomes, The Economics and Ideology of Free Trade: A Historical Review
Hank Lim, Ungsuh K. Park and G. C. Harcourt (eds), Editing Economics. Essays in Honour of Mark Perlman.
David Miles, Gareth Myles, and Ian Preston (eds), The Economics of Public Spending
Carlota Perez, Technological Revolutions and Financial Capital
B. Copeland and S. Taylor, Trade and the Environment: Theory and Evidence
Peter Saunders, The Ends and Means of Welfare: Coping with Economic and Social Change in Australia     

Supporting weakly Pareto optimal allocations in infinite dimensional nonconvex economies

In this paper, we prove a new version of the Second Welfare Theorem for economies with a finite number of agents and an infinite number of commodities, when the preference correspondences are not convex-valued and/or when the total production set is not convex. For this kind of nonconvex economies, a recent result, obtained by one of the authors, introduces conditions which, when applied to the convex case, give for Banach commodity spaces the well-known result of decentralization by continuous prices of Pareto-optimal allocations under an interiority condition. In this paper, in order to prove a different version of the Second Welfare Theorem, we reinforce the conditions on the commodity space, assumed here to be a Banach lattice, and introduce a nonconvex version of the properness assumptions on preferences and the total production set. Applied to the convex case, our result becomes the usual Second Welfare Theorem when properness assumptions replace the interiority condition. The proof uses a Hahn-Banach Theorem generalization by Borwein and Jofré (in Joper Res Appl Math 48:169–180, 1997) which allows to separate nonconvex sets in general Banach spacesThis work was partially supported by Nucleo Complex Engineering System. The successive versions of the paper were partly prepared during visits of Alejandro Jofré to CERMSEM and of Monique Florenzano and Pascal Gourdel to the Centro de Modelamiento Matematico. The hospitality of both institutions and the support of the french Coopération régionale Cone Sud are gratefully aknowledged. The authors thank Ali Khan for stimulating exchange of ideas and literature, Roko Aliprantis, Jean-Marc Bonnisseau, Alain Chateauneuf, Roger Guesnerie, Filipe Martins Da Rocha, Moncef Meddeb, B. Mordukovich, Lionel Thibault and Rabee Tourky for valuable discussions     

Assessing the Welfare Impact of Tax Reform: A Case Study of the 2001 U.S. Tax Cut

This note acknowledges a programming error in our paper, “Assessing the Welfare Impact of Tax Reform: A Case Study of the 2001 U.S. Tax Cut” (Review of Income and Wealth, 58(2), 233–56, 2012). Correcting the error primarily has the effect of scaling the calculated family welfare impact of 2001 U.S. Tax Cut. The primary conclusions from the analysis, however, are unaffected.     

Reviews

Book reviewed in this article:
Ricardo–The New View. Collected Essays I , by Samuel Hollander
The Economics of the Trade Union , by Alison Booth.
The Struggle for Industrial Relations in Australia , by Braham Dabscheck
The Current Account and Foreign Debt , by John Pitchford
The Transformation of the World Economy , 1980–1993, by Robert Solomon
The Legacy of Hicks: His Contributions to Economic Analysis , edited by Harald Hagemann and O.F. Hamouda
The Measurement of Household Welfare , edited by Richard Blundell, Ian Preston and Ian Walker
Current Issues in Public Choice , edited by Jose Casas Pardo and Friedrich Schneider     

Reviews

Book reviewed in this article:
Whither Socialism? , by Joseph E. Stiglitz
The World Economy and National Finance in Historical Perspective , by C.P. Kindleberger
Full Employment Regained? An Agathotopian Dream , by James E. Meade, with an Introduction by Robert Solow
The Principles of Economics: Some lies my teachers told me , by Lawrence A. Boland
Adam Smith's System of Liberty, Wealth, and Virtue: The Moral and Political Foundations of The Wealth of Nations , by Athol Fitzgibbons
General Equilibrium and Welfare , by John Creedy
Official Papers of Alfred Marshall: A Supplement , edited by Peter D. Groenewegen
Essays in International Economics 1944–1994 , by H.W. Amdl     

Reviews

Book reviewed in this article:
Understanding Saving: Evidence from the United States and Japan , by Fumio Hayashi.
An Encyclopedia of Keynesian Economics , edited by Thomas Cate.
Riches and Poverty: An Intellectual History of Political Economy in Britain, 1750–1834 , by Donald Winch.
Bayesian Analysis in Econometrics and Statistics: The Zellner View and Papers , by Arnold Zellner.
The New Zealand Economy: Issues and Policies edited by Stuart Birks and Srikanta Chatterjee.
Central Banking in Developing Countries by Anand Chandavarkar.
Environmental Taxes and Economic Welfare, Reducing Carbon Dioxide Emissions , by Antonia Cornwell and John Creedy.
Corporate Governance , edited by Kevin Keasey.
Political Cycles and the Macroeconomy , by Alberto Alesina.     

Reviews

Book reviewed in this article: The Deterioration in Economic Performance: A Study of the 1970's with Particular Reference to Australia, by W. E. Norton Unemployment, Inflation and New Macroeconomic Policy, by T. D. N. Perkins Australian Social Welfare Finance, edited by R. Mendelsohn Wage Indexation: A Study of Australian Wage Issues, 1975–1980, by David H. Plowman Agriculture in the Australian Economy, edited by D. B. Williams Anticipations of the General Theory? And Other Essays on Keynes, by D. Patinkin The Theory and Experience of Economic Development: Essays in Honor of Sir W. Arthur Lewis, edited by M. Gersovitz Alfred Marshall:Critical Assessments, edited by John C. Wood     

A summary of ISEW and GPI studies at multiple scales and new estimates for Baltimore City, Baltimore County, and the State of Maryland

This paper (1) summarizes a number of previous Index of Sustainable Economic Welfare (ISEW) and Genuine Progress Indicator (GPI) studies at various scales; (2) estimates the GPI for Baltimore, Baltimore County, and the State of Maryland; and (3) compares these results with previous and parallel studies. GPI incorporates environmental, social, and economic information into a single metric to represent economic well-being. At all three scales, GPI was found to grow at a slower rate than the conventional economic measure of gross domestic product (GDP), while at the US national scale GPI has been relatively flat since 1975. State-level results match an independently calculated Maryland GPI, confirming that GPI methods are robust and reproducible. In addition, the State of Maryland has recently made GPI one of their official State statistics, reported annually. State-level GPI results were also compared with studies for the states of Ohio and Vermont to explore regional differences. We recommend that the GPI research community develop consensus on a standardized measurement approach and seek common ground for advancing the use of improved indicators and accounting systems in official policy settings.     

Reviews

Book reviewed in this article:
Wealth and Welfare: Collected Essays on Economic Theory , Volume 1, by John Hicks (Basil Blackwell, Oxford, 1981)
ASEAN in a Changing Pacific and World Economy , edited by Ross Garnaut (Australian National University Press, Canberra, 1980)
Energy Economics: Growth Resources and Policies , by R. Eden, M. Posner, R. Bending and J. Stanislaw (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1981)
Mobility and Community Change in Australia , edited by I. G. Burnley, R. J. Pryor and D. T. Rowland
Free to Choose , by Milton and Rose Friedman (Penguin, Harmondsworth, 1980)