Priority for the Worse Off and the Social Cost of Carbon

The social cost of carbon (SCC) is a monetary measure of the harms from carbon emission. Specifically, it is the reduction in current consumption that produces a loss in social welfare equivalent to that caused by the emission of a ton of CO2. The standard approach is to calculate the SCC using a discounted-utilitarian social welfare function (SWF)—one that simply adds up the well-being numbers (utilities) of individuals, as discounted by a weighting factor that decreases with time. The discounted-utilitarian SWF has been criticized both for ignoring the distribution of well-being, and for including an arbitrary preference for earlier generations. Here, we use a prioritarian SWF, with no time-discount factor, to calculate the SCC in the integrated assessment model RICE. Prioritarianism is a well-developed concept in ethics and theoretical welfare economics, but has been, thus far, little used in climate scholarship. The core idea is to give greater weight to well-being changes affecting worse off individuals. We find substantial differences between the discounted-utilitarian and non-discounted prioritarian SCC

Impact of an Innovative Financing and Payment Model on Tuberculosis Patients’ Financial Burden: is Tuberculosis Care More Affordable for the Poor?

Background: In response to the high financial burden of health services facing tuberculosis (TB) patients in China, the China-Gates TB project, Phase II, has implemented a new financing and payment model as an important component of the overall project in three cities in eastern, central and western China. The model focuses on increasing the reimbursement rate for TB patients and reforming provider payment methods by replacing fee-for-service with a case-based payment approach. This study investigated changes in out-of-pocket (OOP) health expenditure and the financial burden on TB patients before and after the interventions, with a focus on potential differential impacts on patients from different income groups

Rural Nonfarm Activities and Poverty in the Brazilian Northeast

This paper combines two complementary data sets to present a disaggregated spatial profile of poverty in the Brazilian Northeast, and to investigate the importance of nonagricultural activities for its rural dwellers. We present both univariate and multivariate profiles of nonagricultural employment and discuss its determinants. While the main occupational difference between the rural poor and the rural nonpoor in Brazil seems to be the greater reliance of the former on paid agricultural employment (vīs-à-vis own cultivation), rather than access to nonagricultural activities, the evidence nevertheless suggests that diversification into this growing sector provides both an important complement to the budgets of the poor, and possibly a self-insurance mechanism against negative shocks. Despite the substantial heterogeneity of the sector, two general findings are robust: returns to education are comparatively high: and location in relation to urban areas is an important determinant of both employment and earnings in rural nonagricultural activities. © 2001 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved

Lives and livelihoods: Estimates of the global mortality and poverty effects of the Covid-19 pandemic

We evaluate the global welfare consequences of increases in mortality and poverty generated by the Covid-19 pandemic. Increases in mortality are measured in terms of the number of years of life lost (LY) to the pandemic. Additional years spent in poverty (PY) are conservatively estimated using growth estimates for 2020 and two different scenarios for its distributional characteristics. Using years of life as a welfare metric yields a single parameter that captures the underlying trade-off between lives and livelihoods: how many PYs have the same welfare cost as one LY. Taking an agnostic view of this parameter, we compare estimates of LYs and PYs across countries for different scenarios. Three main findings arise. First, we estimate that, as of early June 2020, the pandemic (and the observed private and policy responses) had generated at least 68 million additional poverty years and 4.3 million years of life lost across 150 countries. The ratio of PYs to LYs is very large in most countries, suggesting that the poverty consequences of the crisis are of paramount importance. Second, this ratio declines systematically with GDP per capita: poverty accounts for a much greater share of the welfare costs in poorer countries. Finally, a comparison of these baseline results with mortality estimates in a counterfactual “herd immunity” scenario suggests that welfare losses would be greater in the latter in most countries

Death and destitution: the global distribution of welfare losses from the COVID-19 pandemic

The Covid-19 pandemic has brought about massive declines in wellbeing around the world. This paper seeks to quantify and compare two important components of those losses – increased mortality and higher poverty – using years of human life as a common metric. We estimate that almost 20 million life-years were lost to Covid-19 by December 2020. Over the same period and by the most conservative definition, over 120 million additional years were spent in poverty because of the pandemic. The mortality burden, whether estimated in lives or in years of life lost, increases sharply with GDP per capita. The poverty burden, on the contrary, declines with per capita national incomes when a constant absolute poverty line is used, or is uncorrelated with national incomes when a more relative approach is taken to poverty lines. In both cases the poverty burden of the pandemic, relative to the mortality burden, is much higher for poor countries. The distribution of aggregate welfare losses – combining mortality and poverty and expressed in terms of life-years – depends both on the choice of poverty line(s) and on the relative weights placed on mortality and poverty. With a constant absolute poverty line and a relatively low welfare weight on mortality, poorer countries are found to bear a greater welfare loss from the pandemic. When poverty lines are set differently for poor, middle and high-income countries and/or a greater welfare weight is placed on mortality, upper-middle and rich countries suffer the most