BACKGROUND The paper describes the origins of the Value of Children (VOC) approach to the cross-cultural research on fertility behavior around the Pacific Rim, and critically discusses its shortcomings at this stage. OBJECTIVE The paper then demonstrates how the approach derives its theoretical coherence from the theory of social production functions, making reference to empirical evidence. RES...

Immigrants in a Booming Economy: Analysing their Earnings and Welfare Dependence * Ireland’s exceptional economic growth in recent years has led to an influx of immigrants. Given the favourable economic climate into which these immigrants are arriving, it is interesting to ask how their earnings and welfare dependence compare with the native population. To the extent that strong economic growth...

Article history: Received 13 January 2011 Received in revised form 7 May 2014 Available online xxxx JEL classification: D51 E20 E32 E63

The present difficulties of democratic welfare states in Europe are often ascribed to economic "globalization", that is to the world-wide integration of markets for capital, goods and services which has eliminated national control over boundary-crossing economic transactions, and which therefore exposes national producers to world-wide competition. In fact, however, globalization in the strict ...

Mothers, Fathers and Children after Divorce: The Role of Institutions In recent years the increase in the divorce rate in many advanced countries and the predominance of female-headed families among the poor has generated much interest in the relationship between divorce and the welfare of mothers and children. In this paper I will review a small body of economic literature which has been recen...

Many countries in the European Union (EU) and the European Economic Area (EEA) are in an economic recession. It is acknowledged that a recession or economic crisis can have an effect on the population’s health, especially with respect to infectious diseases [1]. There are two main mechanisms through which an economic crisis can have an effect on infectious diseases. Firstly, if due to a decreas...

It is often necessary to specify social welfare functions (SWFs) to allocate forms of capital that provide public services to heterogeneous agents yet lie outside of capital markets. Of the SWFs consistent with Pareto optimality, only weighted combinations of individual utilities with “Negishi”, inverse marginal utility of the numeraire (income), weights replicate market outcomes for given init...

We link a stochastic binary choice model of individual decisions to participate in the marine sport fisheries in Cook Inlet, Alaska, with a simulation-based sample enumeration procedure for aggregating estimates of individual angler welfare and a regionally adjusted zip code-level input-output model of regional economic activity. The result is a behaviorally based model for predicting changes i...

Lameness of dairy cattle is an economic and welfare issue. It is the third most important health related economic loss facing the dairy industry, following fertility and mastitis. Most economic loss due to lameness results from costs of premature culling, veterinary treatment, increased labor, discarded milk, prolonged calving interval, and reduced milk production (Kossaibati and Esslemont, 199...