We address the issue of existence of an allocation rule that satis es both Pareto e ciency and a suitable notion of no-envy in the overlapping generations' economy formulated by Samuelson (1958). Recent contributions to dynamic social welfare analysis have insisted on intergenerational equity by comparing in nite horizon utility streams (see among others Fleurbaey and Michel 2003; Basu and Mitr...

Despite 120 years of rabbit (Oryctolagus cuniculus L.) control in New Zealand, there is a surprising dearth of quantitative information on the damage rabbits cause to agricultural systems and the environment. Research and debate on rabbits have traditionally centred on the various technical options available for their control, and their cost efficiency. Little attention has been paid to the env...

While studying animal-based measures to be included in the welfare assessment protocols, researchers often identify potential welfare indicators that do not fulfil the standards. This could be due to low prevalence, ambiguous meaning, lack of interobserver repeatability, or unknown or controversial validity. In this talk we will present some potentially useful welfare indicators that have not b...

This paper is a survey of the literature on theoretical models of the household, paying particular attention to some of the earlier contributions, and using them to place the current state of the theory in perspective. One of its aims is to suggest that the literature’s neglect of Samuelson’s proposal, that households can be modelled as if they maximised a form of social welfare function, was a...

This paper proposes a theory of optimal taxation using the tax reform approach and generalized social marginal welfare weights to capture social preferences for redistribution. A tax system is optimal if no budget neutral small reform can increase a weighted sum of (money metric) gains and losses across individuals. However, the weights used for aggregating gains and losses are not derived from...

We consider the social preference ordering in a society where each individual’s preference domain is restricted to a subset of the whole set of alternatives. We show that the social welfare function satisfying unrestricted domain property, independence of irrelevant alternatives and weak Pareto optimality is always dictatorial when at least one individual is entitled to express his/her preferen...

Can the Pareto criterion guide policymakers who do not know the true model of the economy? If policymakers specify ex ante preferences for agents, then Pareto improvements from a distorted status quo are usually possible, and with more commodities than states, one can implement almost every Pareto optimum. Unlike the standard second welfare theorem, planners cannot dictate allocations: agents m...