The Measurement Of Welfare

The measurement of household welfare is one of the most compelling yet demanding areas in economics. To place the analysis of inequality and poverty within an economic framework where individuals are making decisions about current and lifetime incomes and expenditures is a difficult task, made all the more challenging by the complexity of the decision-making process in which households are involved and the variety of constraints they face. This 1994 book examines the conceptual and practical difficulties of making inferences from observed behaviour. It addresses the problems of making comparisons across a range of very different households and discusses how data for such comparisons should be collected. The contributions, from experts from Europe, North America and Australia, have the unifying theme that there is a strong relationship between theoretical concepts from microeconomics and the appropriate use of micro data in evaluating household welfare.

This volume presents an approach to the evaluation of economic policies through the econometric modeling of aggregate consumer behavior. While the preferences of individual consumers are revealed by their market choices, these preferences can be recovered only by econometric methods, not through the index numbers used in the official statistics. The richer and more robust methodology presented in this volume provides a fruitful point of departure for future policy evaluations. The econometric approach replaces ordinal measures of individual welfare that cannot be compared among individuals with cardinal measures that can. These are combined into an indicator of social welfare that reflects principles of horizontal and vertical equity. This approach unifies the measurement of poverty, inequality, and cost and standard of living. It extends the scope of normative economics to a broader range of issues in the evaluation of economic and social policies.

Professor McKenzie proposes and formulates a method composed of operational procedures designed to facilitate the evaluation of economic projects and policies. This method is discussed fully, illustrated by simple examples, and compared with alternative procedures. An outline of a computer program that enables readers to undertake their own calculations is included. In order to present the approach clearly, the author provides an exposition of the fundamental ideas and the main alternative approaches to the problem. These rely on various forms of index numbers and consumer surplus. However, as is well known, such measures are not capable of correctly ordering the various alternatives under consideration, except under highly unrealist assumptions. In this book the author suggests the abandonment of this traditional approach based on the concept of 'willingness-to-pay' or the conpensating variation. Instead, the measure that Samuelson has called the 'money-metric' should become the cornerstone of applied welfare economics.

Disputes over government policies rage in a number of areas. From taxation to climate change, from public finance to risk regulation, and from health care to infrastructure planning, advocates debate how policies affect multiple dimensions of individual well-being, how these effects balance against each other, and how trade-offs between overall well-being and inequality should be resolved. How to measure and balance well-being gains and losses is a vexed issue. Matthew D. Adler advances the debate by introducing the social welfare function (SWF) framework and demonstrating how it can be used as a powerful tool for evaluating governmental policies. The framework originates in welfare economics and in philosophical scholarship regarding individual well-being, ethics, and distributive justice. It has three core components: a well-being measure, which translates each of the possible policy outcomes into an array of interpersonally comparable well-being numbers, quantifying how well off each person in the population would be in that outcome; a rule for ranking outcomes thus described; and an uncertainty module, which orders policies understood as probability distributions over outcomes. The SWF framework is a significant improvement compared to cost-benefit analysis (CBA), which quantifies policy impacts in dollars, is thereby biased towards the rich, and is insensitive to the distribution of these monetized impacts. The SWF framework, by contrast, uses an unbiased measure of well-being and allows the policymaker to consider both efficiency (total well-being) and equity (the distribution of well-being). Because the SWF framework is a fully generic methodology for policy assessment, Adler also discusses how it can be implemented to inform government policies. He illustrates it through a detailed case study of risk regulation, contrasting the implications of results of SWF and CBA. This book provides an accessible, yet rigorous overview of the SWF approach that can inform policy-makers and students.

"Choice, Welfare and Measurement contains many of Amartya Sen's most important contributions to economic analysis and methods, including papers on individual and social choice, preference and rationality, and aggregation and economic measurement. A substantial introductory essay interrelates his diverse concerns, and also analyzes discussions generated by the original papers, focusing on the underlying issues."--P. [4] of cover.

Nanak Kakwani and Hyun Hwa Son make use of social welfare functions to derive indicators of development relevant to specific social objectives, such as poverty- and inequality-reduction. Arguing that the measurement of development cannot be value-free, the authors assert that if indicators of development are to have policy relevance, they must be assessed on the basis of the social objectives in question. This study develops indicators that are sensitive to both the level and the distribution of individuals’ capabilities. The idea of the social welfare function, defined in income space, is extended to the concept of the social well-being function, defined in capability space. Through empirical analysis from selected developing countries, with a particular focus on Brazil, the authors shape techniques appropriate to the analysis of development in different dimensions. The focus of this evidence-based policy analysis is to evaluate alternative policies affecting the capacities of people to enjoy a better life.

This book provides a general framework for the use of theoretical contributions in empirical works, addressing the question of what is the effect of a price change on household well-being. This simple question is one of the most relevant and controversial questions in microeconomic theory and one of the main sources of errors in empirical economics. In particular, this book aims to 1) Review the essential microeconomics literature since the first seminal papers by Hicks in the 1930s; 2) Organize and simplify this literature in a way that can be easily used by analysts with different backgrounds providing algebraic, geometric and computational illustrations; 3) identify and measure the essential differences across methods and test how these differences affect empirical results; 4) Provide guidelines for the use of alternative approaches under imperfect information on utility, demand systems, elasticities and more generally incomes and quantities; 5) Provide computational codes in Stata for the application of all methods. The focus of the book is on developing economies and the poor, and the assumptions made will relate primarily to these countries and group of people, presumably the main policy focus of international organizations and national governments.