The introduction of sociological variables in Engle curve analysis.

Variables;

Ethical concerns about the integration of european financial markets.

Integration; Market; Markets;

The capabilities approach

Capabilities and functionings are new and attractive concepts for assessing the well-being and advantage of individuals. Functionings refer to a person’s achievements, i.e. what she manages to do or to be. Capabilities refer to her real opportunities and incorporate the idea of freedom. We discuss how recent theoretical and empirical work has improved our insights in some of the key questions of the approach. How to measure opportunities and how to balance freedom and responsibility? How to formulate a list of capabilities which can be used to analyse changes over time and differences between different societies without being open to manipulation? How to construct an overall index of well-being and what should be the relative role of a priori ethical evaluations and of the opinions of the individuals themselves? What is the relationship between measures of well-being and advantage at the individual and at the aggregate level? To make further progress it is crucial, first, to estimate structural models with individual data, analysing the link between individual achievements, the socioeconomic and environmental background of the persons concerned and the specific features of the individual processes of choice and decision-making; and, second, to integrate the insights from these models in a coherent ethical framework specifying the role of individual preferences and the limits of personal responsibility.capabilities, opportunities

Mr. Fairmind is Post-Welfarist: Opinions on Distributive Justice

I survey the results of empirical research, showing that the opinions about distributive justice of the population at large are in sharp conflict with the assumptions of tradi-tional welfare economics. I focus on the results concerning welfarism and concerning the Pigou-Dalton transfer criterion. At the same time, I show that recent developments in social choice theory are much more in line with the empirical results. This suggests that a better understanding of the complementarity between empirical and theoretical work might lead to a richer debate and to a greater awareness of the possible biases in the economic approach.

Mr. Fairmind Is Post-Welfarist: Opinions on Distributive Justice

I survey the results of empirical research, showing that the opinions about distributive justice of the population at large are in sharp conflict with the assumptions of traditional welfare economics. I focus on the results concerning welfarism and concerning the Pigou-Dalton transfer criterion. At the same time, I show that recent developments in social choice theory are much more in line with the empirical results. This suggests that a better understanding of the complementarity between empirical and theoretical work might lead to a richer debate and to a greater awareness of the possible biases in the economic approach.

Unfair inequalities in health and health care

Inequalities in health and health care are caused by different factors. Measuring "unfair"inequalities implies that a distinction is introduced between causal variables leading toethically legitimate inequalities and causal variables leading to ethically illegitimateinequalities. An example of the former could be life-style choices, an example of the latter issocial background. We show how to derive measures of unfair inequalities in health and in health care delivery from a structural model of health care and health production: “direct unfairness”, linked to the variations in medical expenditures and health in the hypothetical distribution in which all legitimate sources of variation are kept constant; “fairness gap”, linked to the differences between the actual distribution and the hypothetical distribution in which all illegitimate sources of variation have been removed. These two approaches are related to the theory of fair allocation. In general they lead to different results. We propose to analyse the resulting distributions with the traditional apparatus of Lorenz curves and inequality measures. We compare our proposal to the more common approach using concentration curves and analyse the relationship with the methods of direct and indirect standardization. We discuss how inequalities in health care can be integrated in an overall evaluation of social inequality.equity in health care delivery, health inequality, social welfare

The Choice of Inequality Measure in Empirical Research on Distributive Judgements.

We analyse questionnaire data from a representative sample of the Flemish working population. For 781 respondents we construct their perception of the actual and of the fair income distribution. We check whether the use of different inequality measures leads to different interpretations of these data. The ranking of individuals on the basis of their perceived and fair inequality is hardly affected and the same is true for the explanation of the interindividual variation. However, the simple classification of individual respondents in those who want and those who do not want less inequality does depend on the measure used in 20% of the cases. Moreover, the tendency to equalise is a poor measure of conservatism.

Is ELIE a wasteful minimum income scheme?

ELIE can be interpreted as a minimum income scheme, financed by lump-sum taxes. It may induce social waste as individuals with a low taste for working may opt for voluntary unemployment. We simulate the magnitude of this social waste with microdata for Belgium and compare ELIE with a firstbest scheme and a second-best scheme (based on a linear income tax), implementing the same minimum income. As expected, the social waste induced by ELIE is intermediate between the social waste induced by the first- and second-best schemes. Assumptions about the preferences of the voluntarily unemployed play a crucial role.

Is ELIE a wasteful minimum income scheme?.

ELIE can be interpreted as a minimum income scheme, financed by lump-sum taxes. It may induce social waste as individuals with a low taste for working may opt for voluntary unemployment. We simulate the magnitude of this social waste with microdata for Belgium and compare ELIE with a firstbest scheme and a second-best scheme (based on a linear income tax), implementing the same minimum income. As expected, the social waste induced by ELIE is intermediate between the social waste induced by the first- and second-best schemes. Assumptions about the preferences of the voluntarily unemployed play a crucial role.