Concerns about farm animal welfare vary among individuals and societies. As people increasingly consider the values underlying current farm animal production methods, farm animal welfare policy debates have escalated. Recent food animal protection policies enacted in the European Union have fueled highly contentious discussions about the need for similar legislative activity in the United State...

Performance measurement is generally depicted as a neutral, technical exercise providing objective data for decision-making. But it also has a normative role in framing policy problems and solutions. This article explores the role of indicators in shaping child welfare, comparing stated policy with performance indicator regimes in England. It shows how indicators construct child welfare narrowl...

Social welfare functions (SWFs) are used in welfare-maximizing climate-economy models as objective functions to identify ‘optimal’ climate policies, to quantitatively compare alternative policies, and to characterize the costs of achieving alternative normative constraints. This paper reviews the main SWFs that have been applied in climate policy analyses according to the welfare maximization p...

The purpose of this paper is to discuss the choice between an exchange rate target and an inflation target for Norway. The paper also contains a brief discussion of the objectives of monetary policy and of an optimal delegation of monetary policy in a representative democracy, which serves to place this choice in a broader context. 1 Monetary policy goals Let me start from the presumption that ...

This paper estimates that the US could attain large welfare gains by implementing an optimal Ramsey tax policy that taxes consumption and income. It is also found that the welfare implications associated with taxing consumption are quantitatively more important than those associated with dynamically taxing income. Indeed, replacing income taxes with a constant consumption tax leads to a welfare...