ENVIRONMENTAL quality has be­ come a prime public concern worldwide. Not surprisingly, the improvement of environmental stan­ dards is high on public representatives’ agenda. However, the public desire for higher environmental standards has usu­ ally met with severe resistance by domes­ tic industrial groups and their lobbies. Underlying this resistance has been industry’s claim that by raising...

We analyze the impact of an endogenous minimum quality standard (MQS) imposed on an industry collectively by producers based upon a profit criterion, a situation common to agricultural industries. A MQS can enhance net welfare in these settings because it may correct for deficient production of high-quality product by the industry in the absence of a MQS. However, we show that any MQS imposed v...

It has been known that, in aggregating infinite utility streams, there does not exist any social welfare function, which satisfies the axioms of Pareto, inter-generational equity and continuity. We show that the impossibility result persists even without imposing the continuity axiom. Hence, the problem of accommodating inter-generational equity is more obstinate than previously supposed. The p...

We present some results on social welfare function and social choice function. First, we replace weak Pareto principle of Arrow’s axioms with strong Pareto principle, and then show that assuming unrestricted domain property, independence of irrelevant alternatives and strong Pareto principle on a social welfare function in Arrow’s sense leads to the existence of first to nth commanders whose st...

The economic literature on “optimal income taxation” addresses the question of how to design tax and transfer policy so as to maximize “social welfare,” which is some function of the wellbeing of all members of society. It clarifies how the social-welfare-maximizing policy depends on one’s philosophy of distributive justice, and on empirical evidence about the behavioral response to incentives,...

A simple linear programming problem permits a brief and elementary proof of Harsanyi’s utilitarianism theorem: a Paretian social welfare function must be a weighted (affine) sum of individual utility functions when individual utilities and social welfare all take the Neumann–Morgenstern form. By adjusting the programming problem slightly, we conclude that the weights on individual utilities are...

This paper inverts the usual logic of applied optimal income taxation. It starts from the observed distribution of income before and after redistribution and corresponding marginal tax rates. Under a set of simplifying assumptions, it is then possible to recover the social welfare function that would make the observed marginal tax rate schedule optimal. In this framework, the issue of the optim...

This paper examines the welfare effects of credit and shortsales constraints and limited liability/minimum consumption guarantee in an overlapping generations (OLG) model with rational beliefs in the sense of Kurz (1994). To measure the social welfare, it instead adopts an ex post social welfare concept in the sense of Hammond (1981), since the standard Pareto criterion becomes inappropriate wh...