Compensation and responsibility

This a chapter for the Handbook of Social Choice and Welfare. It deals with the theory of fairness applied to situations when individuals are partly responsible for their characteristics.fairness, responsibility, equal opportunity, compensation, handicap, talent, effort

Public views on principles for health care priority setting: findings of a European cross-country study using Q methodology

International audienc

Compensation and responsibility

This a chapter for the Handbook of Social Choice and Welfare. It deals with the theory of fairness applied to situations when individuals are partly responsible for their characteristics

Axiomatic Bargaining Theory on Opportunity Assignments

This paper discusses issues of axiomatic bargaining problems over opportunity assignments. The fair arbitrator uses the principle of "equal opportunity" for all players to make the recommendation on re- source allocations. A framework in such a context is developed and several classical solutions to standard bargaining problems are reformulated and axiomatically characterized. Working Paper 06-4

The Pazner-Schmeidler Social Ordering: A Defense

It is shown that the Pazner-Schmeidler social ordering appears as a very natural solution to the problem of defining social preferences over distributions of a fixed bundle of divisible goods. The paper follows an approach to preference aggregation which relies only on interpersonally non-comparable preferences, and circumvents Arrow's impossibility by taking account of the shape of indifference curves. Social preferences can then be constructed and justified with fairness principles.social welfare, social choice, fairness, egalitarian-equivalencesocial welfare, public choice

Measurement Issues for Adequacy Comparisons among Pension Systems. ENEPRI Research Report No. 64, 16 January 2009

In this paper, indexes are proposed in order to capture the degree to which a pension scheme 1) prevents poverty among the elderly, 2) enables smoothing of living standards after retirement and 3) induces both intra- and inter-generational solidarity

Dividing bads under additive utilities

We compare the Egalitarian rule (aka Egalitarian Equivalent) and the Competitive rule (aka Comeptitive Equilibrium with Equal Incomes) to divide bads (chores). They are both welfarist: the competitive disutility profile(s) are the critical points of their Nash product on the set of efficient feasible profiles. The C rule is Envy Free, Maskin Monotonic, and has better incentives properties than the E rule. But, unlike the E rule, it can be wildly multivalued, admits no selection continuous in the utility and endowment parameters, and is harder to compute. Thus in the division of bads, unlike that of goods, no rule normatively dominates the other

Poverty in Belgium

The EU Statistics on Income and Living Conditions (SILC) surveys gives a harmonised source of data making it possible to get a good idea of inequality and poverty, at both the Belgian and European levels. Disposable income distribution appears to be slightly more egalitarian in Belgium than the EU15 average, and around 15 p.c. of the population lives below the poverty line in our country, compared with 16 p.c. in the EU15 as a whole Poverty can be defined in many different ways. The rate of monetary poverty corresponds to the percentage of the population with an income below the poverty line. The European Union has conventionally set this threshold at 60 p.c. of the median income. Other approaches (such as that based on material deprivation and the subjective approach, subjective in the sense that it relies on the personal perception of the people being surveyed) contribute to a better understanding of the true nature of poverty but they are not a perfect match. The perceived rate of poverty is thus higher in Belgium and France than the poverty rate based on relative income, whereas the reverse is true in the United Kingdom. The monetary poverty indicators calculated on the basis of the SILC surveys are given preference in this article, even though they are not immune to problems. In particular, disposable income as calculated from the SILC surveys does not take account of several components, including the imputed rent for households that own their home. For households with members of working age, employment offers good protection against poverty, provided a high enough number of hours are worked at an adequate wage level. In Belgium, the minimum wage tends to limit the number of working poor. So, households with a full 100 p.c. work intensity rate in our country enjoy the lowest poverty rate in the EU15, regardless of whether or not they have children in the home. Single parents make up the category of households at the highest risk of poverty. The proportion of retirees living below the poverty line is also higher than that among the population of working age. The situation as regards the elderly nevertheless needs to be put into perspective because proportionally more of these people own their home than among the rest of the population. Education is a key factor for employment. A high level of education goes hand in hand with a lower likelihood of both falling into poverty and remaining poor for long periods of time. Ensuring access to quality education for all is thus essential for promoting equal opportunities. Longitudinal data show that, at any given moment, a large number of people are falling into or getting out of poverty. By comparison with other European countries, Belgium has a very low poverty entry rate, but it also has a fairly low poverty exit rate.poverty, SILC, Belgium, EU