The physical quality of life index: A useful social indicator?

The Overseas Development Council (ODC) provides a measurement called the Physical Quality of Life (PQLI). The PQLI combines infant mortality, life expectancy, and literacy into a single index for each of 150 countries.We assess the usefulness of the PQLI as a social indicator. In order to make this determination, we test the intensity of the association among the PQLI input variables. We also provide the appropriate Spearman's rank correlation between PQLI and Gross National Product per capita (GNP/C). Overall, our statistical tests confirm that the PQLI is not a major new indicator of inter-country human welfare.     

社会福利社会化:国际比较与启示

社会福利是衡量一个国家社会保障水平的重要标志,是一种高层次的社会保障。世界各国都有着自己特色的社会福利制度,本文对美英等6个有代表性的国家社会福利的内容、资金来源和管理服务进行比较分析,发现社会福利社会化、多元化已经成为社会福利制度发展的必然趋势。中国社会福利社会化的完善,需要明确小政府—大社会的福利理念,积极引导非营利组织的参与,加强立法,建立适度普惠型的社会福利制度。     

台湾社会福利制度对大陆的启示

台湾进入后工业社会时期以来,积极推进社会福利制度,特别是在劳工社会保险、全民健康保险、农村社会福利、国民年金制度等方面取得重要进展,但也存在着财政负担过重、社会保障欠公平、社会福利保障体系不够健全等问题。台湾社会福利制度的经验和教训对大陆社会保障制度的建立和完善,具有重要的启迪和借鉴意义。     

国内公众对动物福利的认知及进程分析——对比英国动物福利发展史

动物福利被看作是社会发展与人类进步的体现,在经济上也有着改善肉质、影响消费者溢价支付意愿的作用,对我国畜牧业的发展以及实现"乡村振兴"战略有着重要意义。然而我国民众对于动物福利的看法一直滞后于西方,存在对动物福利理解上的不足和偏差。从国内公众对动物福利的认知出发,分析了国内公众对于动物福利的看法,并结合英国动物福利发展史,对我国动物福利的发展进程作出分析:我国在经历了社会思考和法律支持阶段后,应通过动物福利保护提高农产品品质,逐步使动物福利观念深入人心。     

Global economic sustainability indicator: analysis and policy options for the Copenhagen process

The traditional discussion about CO₂ emissions and greenhouse gases as a source of global warming has been rather static, namely in the sense that innovation dynamics have not been considered much. Given the global nature of the climate problem, it is natural to develop a more dynamic Schumpeterian perspective and to emphasize a broader international analysis, which takes innovation dynamics and green international competitiveness into account: We discuss key issues of developing a consistent global sustainability indicator, which should cover the crucial dimensions of sustainability in a simple and straightforward way. The basic elements presented here concern genuine savings rates—covering not only depreciations on capital, but on the natural capital as well—, the international competitiveness of the respective country in the field of environmental (“green”) goods and the share of renewable energy generation. International benchmarking can thus be encouraged and opportunities emphasized—an approach developed here. This new EIIW-vita Global Sustainability Indicator is consistent with the recent OECD requirements on composite indicators and thus, we suggest new options for policymakers. The US and Indonesia have suffered from a decline in their performance in the period 2000–07; Germany has improved its performance as judged by the new composite indicator whose weights are determined from factor analysis. The countries covered stand for roughly 91% of world GDP, 94% of global exports, 82% of global CO₂ emissions and 68% of the population.     

Heights and human welfare: Recent developments and new directions

Since 1995 approximately 325 publications on stature have appeared in the social sciences, which is more than a four-fold increase in the rate of production relative to the period 1977-1994. The expansion occurred in several areas, but especially within economics, indicating that heights are now widely accepted as useful measure of human welfare. Much of this new work extends beyond the traditional bailiwick of anthropometric history, including biological welfare during economic and political crises; anthropometric determinants of wages; the welfare of women relative to men in the contemporary world; the fetal origins hypothesis; and inequality in the developing world. The approach has also expanded within economic history to consider the consequences of empire for colonials; the health of populations lacking traditional measures of social performance; the consequences of smallpox; and very long-term trends in health. Much has also been learned about socioeconomic aspects of inequality, the welfare implications of industrialization, and socioeconomic determinants of stature. The last is a work in progress and one may doubt whether sufficient longitudinal evidence will become available for a complete understanding of the variety and strength of pathways that affect human physical growth.     

Agricultural productivity evolution in China: A generalized decomposition of the Luenberger-Hicks-Moorsteen productivity indicator

China has undergone a series of agricultural policy reforms since 1978. The measurement of the productivity gains and identification of the underlying drivers thereof are important facets of policy analysis. The commonly used Total Factor Productivity (TFP) measures often lack such desirable properties as completeness or independence of the direction of the optimization (orientation). In this paper, we take a top down approach by beginning with a TFP measure and then decomposing it into three mutually exclusive, exhaustive elements. In particular, we begin with the additively complete Luenberger-Hicks-Moorsteen (LHM) TFP indicator that takes into account both input and output changes when measuring productivity and then additively decompose it into measures of technological progress, technical efficiency change, and scale efficiency change. We develop a generalized decomposition of the LHM TFP indicator which encompasses both input-oriented and output-oriented changes over time. We illustrate this additively complete LHM TFP indicator using agricultural data from 31 Chinese provinces over the period 1997–2015. Our empirical results show that Chinese agricultural productivity growth (3.05% per annum) was mainly driven by technological progress (2.35% p.a.), with relatively small contributions from scale efficiency change (0.65% p.a.) and technical efficiency change (0.04% p.a.). We also found that productivity change and the relative importance of its components varied across both time and provinces.     

THE CAMPESINOS' PERSPECTIVES IN LATIN AMERICA*

This article deals with the aborted attempts at land reform in Latin America during the 1960's and outlook for 1970–1980. It has long been evident to the sophisticated—and even to less alert—observers of the Latin American panorama that land reforms are both an essential prerequisite for improving the welfare of the hard-pressed campasinos (peasants) and a cornerstone of general economic, political and social progress.     

Targeting the poor using ROC curves

This paper compares the performance of targeting indicators to identify the poor. If the ROC curve of one indicator lies above that of another, the first indicator dominates the second for all social welfare functions based on the two types of errors involved in targeting. The method is applied to Bangladesh. Fifteen indicators are used, including location, land ownership, education, occupation, demographics, age, family structure, and housing. The analysis is applied at the national, urban, and rural levels with two poverty lines. Education dominates land ownership in urban areas. The ranking is reversed in most cases in rural areas.     

THE ORDINAL AND CARDINAL JUDGMENT OF SOCIAL WELFARE CHANGES IN SINGAPORE, 1982?99

This paper analyzes the changes in social welfare in Singapore using both cardinal and ordinal measures. Labour Force Survey data published by the Manpower Research and Statistics, Department of the Ministry of Manpower, Singapore are used. It is observed with the use of Lorenz dominance technique that social welfare in Singapore during 1999 is less than in 1991 while an unambiguous conclusion cannot be made on the welfare ranking of 1982 and 1991 or of 1982 and 1999. According to the generalized Lorenz dominance, 1999 ranks first; however, this criterion is also unable to make any unambiguous ranking between 1982 and 1991. The ranking based on Sen social welfare function shows a continuous increase in the social welfare in Singapore. But when a more general social welfare function is used a different ordering might occur.     

目前我国小城镇社会福利院存在问题及对策研究——以中原地区小城镇为例

目前,我国小城镇的福利院大体分为两大部分:一是由镇政府开办的福利性社会福利院;一是私人开办,由镇民政部门统一管理的私营养老机构。由镇政府开办的福利性社会福利院存在的问题主要是:资金普遍短缺、工作人员素质偏低、硬件设施简陋和养老观念落后等;由私人开办的养老机构存在的问题主要是:工作人员素质有待提高、硬件设施相对匮乏等。因此,要积极推动小城镇福利院的社会化;加强宣传,逐步更新人们的养老观念;对福利院工作人员进行职业培训,提高素质;地方政府要加强对福利院的监督与控制。西安市慈善会在资金筹集、志愿者队伍建设等方面作了很好的探索。     

Countries' creditworthiness: An indicator from a probit analysis

Summary This article discusses the results of an emperical analysis of developing countries' creditworthiness using data for 32 countries over the sample period 1983–1993, and presents a country risk indicator on the basis of a probit model. In this model the occurrence of payment arrears is related to a set of explanatory variables, which include policy-related and global determinants, next to general macroeconomic and financial variables. The new indicator has a rank correlation of about 0.8 with often used measures provided by rating agencies. Nevertheless, several remarkable differences are present. For Mexico, for instance, our indicator points towards declining creditworthiness since 1989, whereas other ratings show Mexico's creditworthiness to be increasing steadily.Helpful comments by two anonymous referees are gratefully acknowledged.     

Welfare receipt and the intergenerational transmission of work‐welfare norms

This article investigates the role of welfare receipt in shaping norms regarding work and welfare using unique Australian data from the Youth in Focus Project. We begin by incorporating welfare into a theoretical model of the transmission of work‐welfare norms across generations. Consistent with the predictions of this model, we find evidence that youths' attitudes toward work and welfare may be influenced by socialization within their families. Young people are more likely to oppose generous social benefits and to believe that social inequality stems from individual characteristics if (i) their mothers support these views; (ii) their mothers were employed while they were growing up; and (iii) their families never received welfare. Finally, youths' work‐welfare norms appear to be unrelated to their neighbors' welfare receipt suggesting that socialization occurs primarily within families rather than within neighborhoods.     

Consumer discrimination,duopoly, and black firm entry: The welfare effect of subsidies

Consumer discrimination, to the extent that it lowers expected profit for black owned firms, discourages the entry of new black firms. From a social welfare perspective, consumer discrimination may be welfare reducing, since market output is lower than otherwise. If so, a policy intervention that subsidizes new black firms may improve social welfare. This article presents a simple model of duopoly where consumer discrimination exists with uncertainty, and the only cost of production is a “loss of sales” cost. Given the Nash equilibrium, in which a black and white firm must select a price to charge, conditions are derived for which a profit subsidy to a new black firm increases, decreases, or has no effect on social welfare.     

The inequality trap. A comparative analysis of social spending between 1880 and 1930

It is often assumed that the fight against inequality played an important role in the rise of the welfare state. However, using social transfers as an indicator of redistribution and three alternative proxies for inequality—the top income shares, the ratio of the GDP per capita to the unskilled wage, and the share of non‐family farms—this article shows that inequality did not favour the development of social policy between 1880 and 1930. On the contrary, social policy developed more easily in countries that were previously more egalitarian, suggesting that unequal societies were in a sort of inequality trap, where inequality itself was an obstacle to redistribution.     

Missed opportunities? Human welfare in Western Europe and the United States, 1913–1950

GDP suggests that the period 1913–1950 is one of missed opportunities for improving living standards in Europe. However, life in Europe during these years improved significantly, as citizens experienced dramatic declines in mortality, working time and inequality. To measure the contribution of these aspects to broader welfare, I apply a new theoretically-grounded indicator that, contrary to previous measures used in the literature, allows for a direct comparison with GDP across countries and time. I find that income underestimates welfare growth significantly (up to 2.2 percent annually) and that cross-country differences are larger and more persistent than other welfare measures imply. This article calls for a reappraisal of the evolution of living standards during the period 1913–1950 and, more generally, presents an application of a new indicator to measure multi-dimensional welfare in historical contexts.     

构建与我国中等收入水平相适应的适度普惠型社会福利制度

从补缺型社会福利转向适度普惠型社会福利是我国经济发展到中等收入水平的必然要求.适度普惠型社会福利中的“普惠”是指要建立起全体国民均能享受的普享式社会福利;“适度”包含两层含义,一是指社会福利的标准要符合经济发展水平的约束线;二是福利项目和福利内容的选择要符合人的需要层次,随着经济和民主进程的发展逐步涵盖城乡社会生活的各主要方面.关于适度普惠型社会福利的实现途径和路径,文章进一步提出了我国福利支出规模的标准化测度模型,并设计了“三三三”福利实现模式.     

Market structure, pigouvian taxation, and welfare

Using a short-run partial equilibrium model of social welfare, this paper examines the social welfare implications of changing Pigouvian taxes under three markets: perfect competition, monopoly, and Cournot oligopoly. The result for perfect competition supports the earlier finding that Pigouvian taxation increases social welfare [Buchanan, 1969]. However, in contrast to the previous result that Pigouvian taxes lower welfare under monopoly, the authors show that if the noncompetitive distortion is small, these taxes might still be useful in correcting monopoly-generated externalities and in improving social welfare. Cournot firms react to the tax depending upon their individual perceptions of the gain in post-tax marginal revenue. Policy implications of the study's results are discussed.     

排污税与减排补贴的减排效应比较研究

研究排污税、减排补贴对减排的影响机理,并从污染排放控制效果、等量污染排放下的社会福利影响等方面对减排效应进行比较分析,得出以下结论:排污税率、减排补贴率均与污染排放负相关,与社会福利水平的关系均受税率和补贴率的影响;当税率和补贴率等量提高时,排污税效果比减排补贴的效果好;当经济由未采用政策到采用政策而导致等量减排时,就社会福利的增加量而言,减排补贴比排污税的社会福利增加量大。此研究结论从政策的减排效果和福利影响方面,给予政府制定减排政策提供了参考依据。     

试论在我国建立环境公益行政诉讼之必要性及立法构想

人类文明的进步和社会经济的发展是否必须得以牺牲环境为代价,地方政府片面追求经济发展,忽略对环境的保护,甚至做出损害环境与生态资源的行为,应由谁来行使救济的权利,本文试图就在我国建立环境公益行政诉讼制度做一探讨。