Between centralized and decentralized welfare policy: Have national guidelines constrained the influence of local preferences?

Decentralized welfare services allow more flexibility toward individual needs assessment, but may also have negative consequences such as welfare competition or lack of equity between regions. Does national standardization require full centralization of individual assessment, or can a set of unbinding national guidelines reduce unwanted variation between regions? The case of this article is a national benefit norm for municipal social assistance payments issued by the Norwegian central government in 2001. A large share of municipalities changed their local norms to match the national norm in the following years, but data show that local benefit norms are uncorrelated with the actual payments. The apparent compliance to national guidelines does not translate into actual welfare generosity.Although caseworker discretion is important for individual payments, the municipal level of welfare payments is clearly influenced by local preferences and budget constraints. This implies that political control is active, but through other instruments than the local benefit norms.     

POLLUTION AND POLLUTION ABATEMENT IN THE NATIONAL ACCOUNTS

Building on the approach of Weitzman, as extended by Hartwick and Mäler, five models of national accounts in a dynamic competitive economy with pollution externalities are constructed: flow pollutants, stock pollutants, fossil fuels and CO₂, living resources and acid rain, and household defensive expenditures. The results measure welfare rather than national product per se . The general conclusions are that abatement expenditures should be treated as intermediate consumption, that adjustments need to be made for both pollution emissions and natural pollution dissipation processes, that marginal social costs should be used to value emissions, and that the level of environmental services must be valued in measuring welfare. Not only should household defensive expenditures not be subtracted from the welfare measure, under plausible assumptions the adjustment to welfare (as opposed to NNP) includes a value greater than the level of household defensive expenditure.     

城乡公共福利差距的影响因素研究

长期以来,我国财政投入明显偏向城市的政策使城乡基本公共福利存在着巨大差距。随着我国国民经济的快速发展,国家经济实力的增强,农村公共福利供给有所改善,但城乡在教育、卫生医疗、社会保障、基础公共设施和就业服务等方面存在很大差距。目前,在我国公共福利分配主要由地方财政承担的前提下,区域经济发展不平衡、各地区财力大小的不同等因素是导致我国城乡公共福利差异的主要原因。     

On the impossibility of complete Non-Interference in Paretian social judgements

We study a principle of ‘Non-Interference’ in social welfare judgements. Non-Interference captures aspects of liberal approaches (particularly a Millian approach) to social decision making. In its full generality, Non-Interference produces an impossibility result: together with Weak Pareto Optimality, it implies that a social welfare ordering must be dictatorial. However, interesting restricted versions of Non-Interference are compatible with standard social welfare orderings.     

Cultural globalisation, institutional diversity and the unequal accumulation of intellectual capital

National economies used to be characterised by cultural standardisationand social protection. Globalisation pushes cultural standardisationbeyond the boundaries of national states and induces a globaldilution of the standards of social protection. At the sametime, if national economies specialise according to their comparativeinstitutional advantage, global economic integration may helppromote institutional diversity and variety in welfare policies.However, the institution of a global system of intellectualproperty rights may seriously limit the ‘biodiversity’of capitalism and imply a global revenge of a new internationalform of Taylorism. The overall result may be a very unequalaccumulation of intellectual capital. Paradoxically, the modernglobal economy may end up sharing some aspects of the agrariansocieties that have been displaced by modern nation states.     

Green Accounting in Imperfect Market Economies

The idea of measuring the national welfare level by using the green NNP (net national product) has gained much attention lately. This paper summarizes the research on social accounting in imperfect market economies by putting the results into a unified framework. The main contribution of the paper is to relate the form of the national welfare measure to the functioning of the economic system and, therefore, to explicitly address the informational requirements implicit in social accounting.     

河北省建立农村社会保障制度成本效益分析

在现代化进程中，农村社会保障始终处于整个社会保障体系的边缘，农民长期游离于社会保障网络之外。改革的实践和理论都未能突破城市和农村两个独立的圈子，这造成了农村社会保障制度建设严重滞后的状况。建立农村社会保障制度必然要付出巨大的成本，包括推行成本和社会保障费用支出成本。但建立农村社会保障制度带来的社会效益也是非常明显，是难以用数据来衡量的。     

Monetary Union and the Transatlantic and Social Dimensions of Europe's Crisis

With a comparative case study of the social welfare systems of an urban and a rural county in the United States, I explore variation in local welfare implementation by examining organisational strategies. Service provision in the rural county is less diverse and less effective than in the urban county due to place-based factors; however, in the urban county more financial resources and capacity translates into more regulation of the clientele as well as resistance to neoliberal practices. Organisations whose existence depends upon benevolent elites adapt to their funding requirements by regulating clients of social services, including tactics of surveillance, elaborate verification, and restriction. The enforcement of low-wage work that is bracketed by national policy is highly constraining, but can be challenged through a welfare organisation when the right conditions are present for an empowered grassroots approach. These findings are situated within the more general literature on the changing governance of welfare.     

EXPERIENCE IN MEASUREMENT OF WELFARE COMPONENTS AND THEIR REGIONAL IMPLICATIONS

The paper relates the Swedish discussion and criticism of national accounting statistics, especially GNP, as a measure of welfare. It describes some results of recent Swedish attempts to find practicable measures of welfare components, i.e. the investigations of the Low Income Commission and of the Expert Group on Regional Development Research. In both cases the regional aspects of welfare are emphasized in the paper.
The results are presented as a sign of important needs for new methods and new systems of concepts in measuring welfare. The Expert Group has for instance in different ways tried to map and compare the "service structure" of separate parts of Sweden. The Low Income Commission has principally studied the position in Swedish society of low income recipients and has not been working particularly on the illumination of regional differences, but since different types of region are included as a background variable, the investigations also give certain measures of the regional aspects of welfare.
In the last part of the paper some of the risks that seem to be difficult to avoid in trying to use welfare measurements are pointed out.     

SOCIAL CHALLENGES TO ECONOMIC ACCOUNTING AND ECONOMIC CHALLENGES TO SOCIAL ACCOUNTING

The question addressed in this paper is: Why can't we have a good measuring rod of the economic and social performance of our society? The answers are basically positive but lie mostly in the direction of (1) avoiding simplistic solutions such as turning the national income accounts into a measure of social welfare and (2) providing the elements of an information strategy to obtain such a measure or more accurately such a set of measures. The proposed information strategy highlights five activities: (1) the presentation and analysis of welfare outcomes, an activity which is analogous to but broader than “social indicators”; (2) social accounting which includes economic accounting, demographic accounting, and time-use accounting; (3) model building and operation which, unlike accounting, are concerned with behavioral or causal relationships used to explain and project welfare outcomes; (4) hypothesis testing to develop new insights into economic and social behavior; and finally (5) the building and maintenance of a data base required for carrying on the aforementioned four activities.     

二战后西方福利国家制度确立的战略背景与外部因素——以英国为例

自《贝弗里奇报告》（The Beveridge Report）问世以来,以英国为首的一大批西方资本主义国家相继步入了福利国家的行列。针对实施这一政策原因的评估从未停止,然而学术界的讨论或有意或无意地忽视了冷战这一时代大背景,从而对前苏联在这一过程中扮演的角色考虑不够。本文将从领土逻辑和资本逻辑出发,从政治经济学的视角探讨前苏联对英国福利国家制度发展的影响,并揭示这种影响发生作用的具体机制。本文认为一个处于敌对状态的完整的社会主义阵营的存在加速了英国福利国家制度的确立。     

Fan welfare maximization as a club objective in a professional sports league

Motivated by aspects of European soccer club governance (members' clubs supporters' trusts), a first formal analysis of fan welfare maximization as a club objective in a sports league is provided, with comparisons to objectives studied previously (profit and win maximization). Positive comparisons focus on team qualities, ticket prices, attendances and the impact of capacity crowds; empirically observed ticket black markets and inelastic pricing are consistent only with fan welfare maximization. Normatively, social welfare (aggregate league surplus) is well-served by a league of fan welfare maximizers, or sometimes win maximizers, but not profit maximizers; leagues should not normally make profits.     

欧洲福利国家危机的政治经济学分析

20世纪70年代以来,福利国家的危机日益加剧,凯恩斯主义在欧洲各国不同程度地被新自由主义所取代.新自由主义从意识形态、全球化与竞争力、不平等、经济与社会政策、公共财政等方面对福利国家发起了攻击,其目的 不是取消福利国家,而是改变福利国家的内涵,使之服务于新自由主义,其核心利益关切点不再是社会大众,而是金融资本.在这一背...     

On monopoly welfare gains,scale efficiency and the costs of decentralization

Inside the neoclassical framework a monopoly produces an unambiguous loss of social welfare. In this article some dynamic efficiency aspects of monopoly in connection with economies of scale are discussed. Two different cases of the costs of capacity expansion for a branch are compared: (1) the capacity expansion takes place with only one, multiplant, monopoly firm, (2) the capacity expansion takes place in a branch producing the same output but with two or more multiplant firms. It is argued that monopoly welfare gains are likely to arise for a centralized process of capacity expansion compared to a decentralized one.     

Social welfare for an economy of angelic agents

This paper analyzes an economy in which all agents are pursuing the common good (or social welfare) but choices are decentralized, i.e., each agent can choose his/her action in the set of the actions that he/she can perform. One wonders if it is enough the common goal of maximizing social welfare to their will be achieved. The paper examines both the cases in which the choice made by each agent does not directly influence those of other agents, as in the competitive equilibrium analysis, and the case in which there is a direct influence, as in the game theory analyses. In the first case, we get that the common goal of maximizing social welfare is not enough to reach it, but it is necessary to coordinate the actions of individual agents by extending information to redistribute initial endowments and by introducing an appropriate social organization. We get the maximum social welfare without further intervention for the cases describable with the theory of games, but only for games of complete information. If the information is incomplete, some further coordination is generally required.     

Household inequality, social welfare, and trade

Working with Sen social welfare functions (meaning explicit separability between mean income and income dispersion), we develop a generalized dual approach to tracking household inequality aspects of social welfare in general equilibrium. We highlight how household equity can be examined analytically alongside production efficiency in duality-based models, using our dual framework to explore potential trade-offs between efficiency and equity effects of trade policy. Our results complement the set of standard inequality results in trade theory focused on functional rather than household inequality. We also find that the relative distributional impact of tariffs on welfare is conditional on the initial level of inequality.     

The role of natural capital in supporting national income and social welfare

Using life satisfaction as a proxy for social welfare, this study contributes to the extant literature by empirically demonstrating that natural capital contributes to social welfare, functioning in part through increasing national income and in part through its direct effect on life satisfaction; the direct effect is approximately 40% greater than the indirect effect. This suggests that the true welfare benefits of natural capital may not be adequately reflected in conventional economic data and, therefore, studies seeking to evaluate the contribution of natural capital to human well-being should consider employing data sets that capture subjective elements of welfare. The magnitudes of the reported marginal effects of natural capital on social welfare, however, are small. This is perhaps due to the fact that (1) there are shortcomings in the measure of natural capital; (2) life satisfaction effects are unlikely to reflect the poorly understood benefits that natural capital provides; and (3) keystone species (such as mosquitoes) and integral ecosystems (such as wetlands) may be negatively associated with life satisfaction, even though such components of natural capital are vitally important to sustaining ecosystems and human life     

基本公共服务均等化视角下的中国经济增长质量研究

福利分配是评价经济增长质量的一项内容,而基本公共服务均等化正是通过缩小区域差距和城乡差距来提高社会福利总水平从而提高经济增长质量的。本文结合我国改革开放30年来的公共服务状况,通过层次分析法和变异系数建立指标体系对我国基本公共服务及其均等化状况做出评价,认为我国基本公共服务自上世纪80年代开始起步,90年代中期至今发展迅速,但各地区差异较大,特别是社会保障领域和公共卫生医疗领域均等化水平较低。要提高基本公共服务及其均等化水平,需进一步改革公共服务供给体制和公共财政体制,明确各级政府权责关系,加大财政支出中基本公共服务比重,在公共政策制定中偏向落后地区,确保人民共享发展成果。     

More Relatively‐Poor People in a Less Absolutely‐Poor World

Relative deprivation, shame, and social exclusion can matter to the welfare of people everywhere. The paper argues that such social effects on welfare call for a reconsideration of how we assess global poverty. We argue for using a weakly‐relative measure as the upper‐bound complement to the lower‐bound provided by a standard absolute measure. New estimates of poverty are presented. The absolute line is $1.25 a day at 2005 prices, while the relative line rises with the mean, at a gradient of 1:2 above $1.25 a day, consistently with national poverty lines. We find that the incidence of both absolute and weakly‐relative poverty in the developing world has been falling since the 1990s, but more slowly for the relative measure. While the number of absolutely poor has fallen, the number of relatively poor has changed little since the 1990s, and is higher in 2008 than 1981.     

不同经济发展水平下集中居住前后农民的福利变化*——基于成都市不同圈层的比较分析

本文利用来自四川省成都市313户农户的调查数据,在森的可行能力框架下运用模糊评价方法,评价了成都市具有不同经济发展水平的各圈层区域农民集中居住后的福利变化。结果发现：（1）农户福利水平在集中居住后有一定程度的提高,但在不同经济发展水平的圈层之间,集中居住前后农户福利变化的差异较大,经济发展中等水平的第二圈层农户福利改善水平显著高于经济发展水平较高的第一圈层,而经济发展水平较低的第三圈层农户福利水平则有所下降。（2）集中居住改善了农户的居住条件、社会保障、社区活动和社会资源等功能,但恶化了农户家庭经济状况与居住环境。据此提出的相关政策建议是：结合圈层特点促进就业,改善农民家庭经济状况;增强社区绿色治理能力,改善农民居住生态环境;加大公共服务投入力度,改善农民总体福利水平。