价格歧视战略与福利效应分析

在完全竞争市场条件下 ,竞争均衡可实现帕累托最优效率。垄断市场一般很难提供价格等于边际成本的产量水平 ,其产量与价格选择对社会来说不是最优的。垄断厂商以内生范畴和外生范畴为基础对消费者进行分类 ,使得价格歧视成为一种可行战略。由于定价策略存在差异 ,不同类型的价格歧视便具有不同的福利效应。     

Ambiguous Social Welfare Effects of Price Regulation Under Imperfect Competition

Conventional wisdom is that a binding price ceiling increases output and so increases social welfare if imposed on an imperfectly competitive market. However, this paper shows that a price ceiling can be harmful to social welfare even though it increases industry output and consumer surplus. This model can be applied to the pharmaceutical industry under price control in many countries, e.g., U.K., Canada, Germany and Japan.     

Welfare and Integration

This article argues that the terms‐of‐trade and volume‐of‐trade taxonomy from the theory of tariffs constitutes an attractive alternative to Viner's trade diversion and creation effects for the analysis of preferential trading arrangements. In applications of the alternative approach, the article establishes that results by Lipsey and Riezman on large versus small preunion trade flows for choice of partners are not ‘contradictory’ and that under some conditions a small country's optimal strategy is to seek membership of multiple free‐trade areas.     

Welfare Effects of Different Public Expenditures and Taxes in the Netherlands

This paper explores the welfare effects of public consumption, income transfers and public investment financed through different types of taxes. One surprising result is that, contrary to public consumption goods, public capital goods do not necessarily become less attractive if distortionary taxes, rather than lump-sum taxes, are necessary to finance them. The numerical simulations reveal that the net welfare effects of public investments in the Netherlands are typically positive if financed through lump-sum taxes or distortionary taxes on labor. However, if a source-based capital tax is adopted to finance public investments, the overall welfare effect may be negative.     

公立医院公益性问题研究

近年来,公众之所以会对"公立医院是否具有公益性"产生疑问,是源于社会上对"公立医院收费使它们丧失了公益性"的批评,而这种批评又混淆了公立医院提供医疗服务应不应当收费和医疗费用最终应当由谁支付这两个不同的问题。因此,文章在综合各种公益性概念并对公益性给出一个确切定义的基础上,分别梳理了目前国际上医疗费用筹措与医疗服务提供的几种主要方式,分析各自的优缺点,指出了增加公共医疗支付的必要性。文章最后提出,目前我国一些城市试行的"按病种付费"的体制,可望根据实际情况进行改进以后在更大的范围内推广。     

Measuring the Welfare Effects of Price Changes: A Convenient Parametric Approach

This paper shows how compensating and equivalent variations, and the equivalent income, resulting from a set of price changes can be calculated. A linear expenditure system is estimated for each of a range of total expenditure groups using cross-sectional budget data. The measures of welfare change can be used to determine the effect on the welfare of individuals in different income groups. Alternative social welfare functions can be used to evaluate the resulting distribution of equivalent income. The parametric approach is particularly useful where few data are available     

The Welfare and Employment Effects of Centralized Public Sector Wage Bargaining

In many countries, the government pays almost identical nominal wages to workers living in regions with notable economic disparities. By developing a two‐region general equilibrium model with endogenous migration and search frictions in the labor market, I study the differences in terms of unemployment, real wages, and welfare between a regional wage bargaining process and a national one in the public sector. Adopting the latter makes residents in the poorer region better off and residents of the richer region worse off. Private sector employment decreases in the poorer region and it increases in the richer one. Under some conditions, the unemployment rate in the poorer region soars.     

Relative Price Changes and Households' Welfare in Italy

The entrance of Italy in the Euro area in 2001 has given rise to a wide debate about the perception of inflation on households' well‐being. However, most of the debate has involved the measurement of the “correct” consumer price index at the national level. Much less analysis has been carried out on the distributional consequences of inflation on every household. The paper addresses this issue by performing a microsimulation analysis of the impact of inflation on Italian households in the period 1997–2007. It is shown that the impact of inflation has an ambiguous path over the period, with a large concentration of welfare losses around the introduction of the Euro currency. In particular, it is found that poorer and larger households are severely hurt by inflation and that the prices of gas and gasoline are largely responsible for determining the living conditions of Italian households.     

日本地域福利的现状及其走向——以东京都调布市“生活支援照看网络”为例

日本社会福利的制度化框架自1940-1950年代确立以来,其社会福利服务理念不断成熟、规范,特别是随着1970年代地域福利的推进,建设福利社区的计划也在逐步实现.本文拟通过东京都调布市"生活支援照看网络"这一案例的研究来分析日本地域福利的现状,并透过地域中具有连带关系的福利共同体的视角来分析日本地域福利的发展趋势,以期对我国的社会福利事业发展有所启示.     

Integration, Fragmentation and the Geography of Welfare

The welfare effects of trade integration with endogenous production technology are examined in a monopolistic competition framework. In addition to explaining industry location, trade patterns and accompanying effects on local welfare, the analysis highlights the endogenous change in the costs of supervising fragmented production when economies open up to trade. By regarding fragmentation as a skill‐intensive activity, factor proportions (rather than size) strongly affect the international distribution of gains from trade. Nevertheless, albeit not generally, for a wide range of parameter values, even a skill‐poor country can participate in the gains—despite loss of industry.     

Local House Price Effects of Internal Migration in Queensland: Australia's Interstate Migration Capital

We examine the causal impact of internal migration on housing prices across 82 Statistical Areas Level 3 regions in Queensland, Australia from 2014–2019. The primary findings are: (i) an annual increase in the inflow of migrants equal to 1 per cent of a region's initial population leads to a 0.6 to 0.7 per cent annual increase in Queensland's house prices across different empirical specifications; (ii) this effect differs between the Greater Brisbane metropolitan area and Rest of State areas; (iii) migration from New South Wales fails to produce a significant influence on house price growth in Queensland.     

Price Discrimination in Public Healthcare

Could a public healthcare system use price discrimination—paying medical service providers different fees, depending on the service provider's quality—lead to improvements in social welfare? We show that differentiating medical fees by quality increases social welfare relative to uniform pricing (i.e. quality‐invariant fee schedules) whenever hospitals and doctors have private information about their own ability. We also show that by moving from uniform to differentiated medical fees, the public healthcare system can effectively incentivise good doctors and hospitals (i.e. low‐cost‐types) to provide even higher levels of quality than they would under complete information. In the socially optimal quality‐differentiated medical fee system, low‐cost‐type medical‐service providers enjoy a rent due to their informational advantage. Informational rent is socially beneficial because it gives service providers a strong incentive to invest in the extra training required to deliver high‐quality services at low cost, providing yet another efficiency gain from quality‐differentiated medical fees.     

International Integration, Risk and the Welfare State

How does international integration affect the welfare state? Does it call for a leaner or an expanded welfare state? International integration may affect the distortions caused by welfare state activities but also the risks motivating social insurance mechanisms. This paper addresses these potentially counteracting effects in a fully specified intertemporal two–country stochastic endowment model, focusing on the implications when product market integration reduces trade frictions across national product markets. It is shown that lower trade frictions may increase the marginal costs of public funds, which gives an argument for reducing (steady–state) public consumption. However, tighter integration of product markets unambiguously leads to more variability in private consumption, and this gives a case for expanding the social insurance provided via state–contingent public sector activities (automatic stabilizers). JEL classification: E30; F10; H11     

Endogenous Public Policy, Politicization and Welfare

In the two–stage political–economic game that we study public policy is the outcome of the interaction between interest groups and a two–tier government. Implementation of a policy proposed by a bureaucrat requires approval by an elected politician. The objective function of the bureaucrat hinges on the weight assigned to social welfare relative to the rent–seeking outlays of the interest groups. This weight represents the degree of politicization of the government. Our main result is that, in contrast to common belief, increased politicization need not adversely affect the public well–being.     

Inflation, Welfare, and Public Goods

In this article we study the welfare effects of monetary policy in a simple overlapping generation economy in which agents voluntarily contribute to a public good. Inflation has two effects at equilibrium: it increases voluntary contributions and it misallocates private consumption across time. We show that the aggregate effect is welfare-improving for "not too large" inflation rates. Moreover, there exists an optimal inflation rate.