beyond gdp the quest for a measure of social welfare this paper critically examines the various approaches to the measurement of individual well being and social welfare that have been considered for the construction of alternatives to gdp special attention is devoted to recent developments in the analysis of sustainability in the study of happiness in the theory of social choice and fair allocation and in the capability approach it is suggested in the conclusion that although convergence toward a consensual approach is not impossible for the moment not one but three alternatives to gdp are worth developing jel i31 e23 e01

investigating environmental kuznets curve from an energy intensity perspective empirical evidence from china abstract this study pioneers investigating the environmental kuznets curve ekc hypothesis and its possible regional differential characteristics in china based on 2003 2017 years of provincial panel data this research employs panel smooth transition auto regression pstr model to analyze the impact of income levels on environmental pollution and identify the ekc threshold of energy intensity then 30 chinese provinces were categorized by energy intensity to examine the inter provincial and interregional differences in the ekc threshold of energy intensity rather than the traditional threshold of income the results indicate that china s pollution emissions and energy intensities show a stepwise decreasing pattern from the western region to the eastern region in addition the impact of income levels on pollution emissions is non linear and the critical value of energy intensity is 0 9168 between the high and low regimes an inverted u shaped environmental kuznets curve is accepted for energy intensity with 0 7670 as its threshold value when the energy intensity is higher lower than the threshold value the income elasticity of pollution emission is positive negative the more developed provinces and municipalities mainly in the eastern region are proved to exceed the threshold than the provinces in the central and western regions within the sample period given these findings this study further divides china s provinces into eco friendly low pollution and high pollution provinces and accordingly the most important policy recommendations were discussed for policy makers and researchers this research can provide a new insight to investigate countries with unbalanced development levels within and a reference for environmental governance policies in sub regions

national product related welfare measures in the presence of technological change externalities and uncertainty the purpose of this paper is to discuss under what conditions welfare can be measured by observables related to the national product or hamiltonian along the optimal trajectory under nonattributable technological or environmental change welfare will depend on time itself meaning that the hamiltonian along the optimal trajectory will be a biased measure of welfare this result will also hold if we make the time dependence of welfare endogenous by replacing technological change will externalities that are not internalized during optimization on the other hand if we take the externalities fully into account then the hamiltonian will represent the appropriate measure of welfare similar results also hold in the case of uncertainty where we show that a generalized hamiltonian provides a welfare measure and that the deterministic measures are special cases of their stochastic counterparts

a comparative welfare regime approach to global social policy summary beginning from the framework of welfare state regimes in rich capitalist countries this article radically redefines it and applies the new model to regions and countries which experience problematic states as well as imperfect markets a broader comparative typology of regimes welfare state informal security insecurity is proposed which captures the essential relationships between social and cultural conditions institutional performance welfare outcomes and path dependence using this model different regions of the world east asia south asia latin america and sub saharan africa are compared for many poorer partially capitalized societies people s security relies informally upon various clientelist relationships formalizing rights to security via strategies for de clientelization becomes a stepping stone to protecting people against the insecurity of markets

environmental kuznets curve for co2 emissions the case of arctic countries abstract the main new contribution of this paper is to examine the environmental kuznets curve ekc hypothesis using time series data at individual country levels empirical focus is on the assessment of income per capita on co 2 emissions in the arctic countries by taking into account the role of energy consumption an autoregressive distributed lag ardl modeling approach to cointegration is applied to annual data for the period 1960 2010 the results provide little evidence of the existence of the ekc hypothesis for the arctic countries we also find that economic growth has a beneficial effect on the environment only in some arctic countries finally energy consumption is found to have a detrimental effect on the environment in most countries

sustainability and technical progress a rigorous model connects together the following three basic concepts 1 sustainability meaning the generalized future power of an economy to consume over time 2 green nnp meaning a current measure of national income that subtracts off from gnp not just depreciation of capital but also more generally depletion of environmental assets evaluated at current efficiency prices 3 technological progress meaning a projection onto the future of the so called solow residual a simple general formula is derived some crude calculations suggest a possibly strong effect of the residual which hints that our best present estimates of long term sustainability may be largely driven by predictions of future technological progress

theories of policy diffusion lessons from latin american pension reform what accounts for the waves of policy diffusion that increasingly sweep across regions of the world why do many diverse countries adopt similar changes focusing on the spread of chilean style pension privatization in latin america this article assesses the relative merit of four theoretical explanations that scholars of diffusion have proposed as the principal mechanism driving innovations spread these approaches emphasize external pressures emanating especially from international financial institutions the quest for symbolic or normative legitimacy rational learning and cost benefit calculation and cognitive heuristics respectively the article assesses which one of these frameworks can best account for the three distinctive features of diffusion namely its wavelike temporal pattern its geographical clustering and the spread of similarity amid diversity while several approaches contribute to understanding policy diffusion the analysis suggests that the cognitive psychological framework offers a particularly persuasive account of the spread of pension reform

has democratization reduced infant mortality in sub saharan africa evidence from micro data does democracy help babies survive in sub saharan africa by using retrospective fertility surveys conducted in 28 african countries i compare the survival of infants born to the same mother before and after democratization to disentangle the effect of democracy from that of changes in population characteristics which is infeasible with country level statistics on infant mortality i find that infant mortality falls by 1 2 percentage points 12 of the sample mean after democratization in the post cold war period relevant aspects of democracy appear to be the combination of multiparty elections and leadership change

national accounts and environmental resources in the paper optimal growth theory is used to derive the appropriate definition of the net national product concept when there are environmental resources and environmental damage to take into account the basic conclusions are that conventional defined np should be corrected by deducting environmental damage and adding the value of the net change of all resources

on the welfare significance of national product under interest rate uncertainty abstract this paper examines the effects of uncertainty on the relationship between comprehensive nnp and sustainable equivalent consumption it is shown that the classical identity continues to hold in expectations when the discount factor is a stochastic diffusion process taking the form of geometric brownian motion with drift such a result may be useful as a point of departure for classifying the effects that various forms of uncertainty have on the welfare significance of national product

the welfare economic theory of green national accounts this paper takes a critical look at the literature on green national accounts the problem studied is to find a linear index of economic variables that responds to perturbations in the same direction as social well being the thesis of a large literature that net national product which is a flow is that index in closed economies is shown in some interpretations to be simply false and in others to suffer from deep estimation problems it is argued that capital depreciation using shadow prices should certainly be included in national accounts but that the right welfare index is a comprehensive measure of wealth defined as the shadow value of an economy s stock of all capital assets it is shown that comprehensive wealth is usable as a criterion for policy evaluation as well as for determining sustainable economic development

globalization democracy and effective welfare spending in the developing world the literature on the effects of globalization on social policy and welfare and the parallel literature on the effects of democracy operate in mutual isolation to a surprising degree this article extends the debate on the welfare state in the developing world by examining the social policy reactions of democratic and authoritarian governments to globalization using unbalanced panel data on 57 developing nations and considering social security and health and education spending the authors examine whether democratic and authoritarian regimes exhibit similar or different social spending priorities in the context of increasing economic openness the results show that social spending in hard authoritarian regimes is more sensitive to the pressures of globalization than in democratic or intermediate regimes

the transforming power of democracy regime type and the distribution of electricity theory on democracy and its consequences turns on how democracy influences behavior among politicians and the citizenry ultimately the literature seeks to determine who benefits under democratic rules this is our concern posed in a context that allows us to address a classic question does democracy favor large but diffuse segments of society over small but concentrated interests we employ sectoral electricity consumption data for a panel of 733 country years to examine democracy s impact on the distribution of electricity across three sectors that represent distinct political interests industry agriculture and residential consumers we find that in poorer countries democratization produces significant increases in the residential share of electricity relative to industry suggesting sectors with less per capita financial clout but a stronger voice in elections benefit under democracy unlike the large literatures on democracy s impact on the amounts of publicly provided goods our results are among the first on the distribution of those goods

is democracy good for the poor many scholars claim that democracy improves the welfare of the poor this article uses data on infant and child mortality to challenge this claim cross national studies tend to exclude from their samples nondemocratic states that have performed well this leads to the mistaken inference that nondemocracies have worse records than democracies once these and other flaws are corrected democracy has little or no effect on infant and child mortality rates democracies spend more money on education and health than nondemocracies but these benefits seem to accrue to middle and upper income groups

to elect or not to elect leaders alternation in power and social welfare in sub saharan africa abstractthis paper investigates whether and how multiparty elections introduced in many african countries since the early 1990s affect a government s commitment to welfare policies we hypothesise that contested multiparty elections and turnovers between different leaders and political forces in government even when democratic standards are not met positively impact the promotion of social welfare we test these hypotheses through a cross sectional and time series research design making use of our new comprehensive africa leadership change alc dataset empirical results confirm that leaders elected through multiparty elections and countries that experience political alternations in government are associated with higher levels of social welfare

sustainability in uncertain economies a stochastic growth model with a list of capital assets i e reproducible capital non renewable resources the knowledge base and institutions is studied to evaluate the effects of different sources of uncertainty on sustainability it is also discussed which measure can serve as an index of intergenerational welfare to evaluate sustainable development under uncertainty the aim is to consider a more comprehensive setting than is usually explored in the literature and to generalize arrow dasgupta and maler results to the case of uncertainty

on the welfare significance of green accounting as taught by parable abstract green nnp is a national accounting concept that subtracts off from gnp not just depreciation of capital but also depletion of environmental assets for a time autonomous technology green nnp has a rigorous welfare interpretation as an exact measure of the economy s future power to consume the present paper extends the standard framework to cover the case of labor augmenting technological progress for this special case of time dependence a powerful conceptual parable applies it is as if the conclusion from a simple minded welfare story told by the standard neoclassical one sector growth model covers a far more general situation involving any number of different types of capital any convex production possibilities set and fully optimizing behavior implications and applications are discussed

taking the u out of kuznets a comprehensive analysis of the ekc and environmental degradation unlike most environmental kuznets curve ekc studies which focus on narrow measures of pollution as proxies for environmental quality we test the validity of the ekc using the ecological footprint ef a more comprehensive measure of environmental degradation we find no empirical evidence of an ekc relationship between the ef and economic development and only limited support for such a relationship among the components of the ef in addition we discover that energy is largely responsible for the lack of an ekc relationship and that energy consumption levels would have to be cut by over 50 in order for a statistically significant ekc relationship to emerge from the data overall these results suggest that growth alone will not lead to sustainable development

environmental kuznets curve time series application for turkey why controversial results exist for similar models abstract this paper investigates the environmental kuznets curve ekc hypothesis using 40 year spanned time series for the turkey case co 2 emission series representing environmental pressure and gdp per capita values representing economic development are used for the period 1968 2007 a cointegration has been determined among nonstationary series first phases of an inverted u form ekc relationship have been determined for turkey from the econometric estimations this result is conflicting with that of the similar models for turkey case on the other hand this conflict refers the important arguments in the literature and constitutes the main points of the paper sensitivity critiques for example ahking et al for cointegration tests johansen and engle granger tests have been supported in our study moreover we detected important diversion in results according to drift and trend assumptions both in ci vector and ekc model specifications we conclude that building ekc model according to cointegration ci equation restrictions can be important source for diversion when sensitivity exists in estimations and cointegration tests therefore ekc estimations should be held in non restrictive way the additional structural reasons have been also discussed for developing country ekc cases the most important one is that the narrow income sample of developing countries makes it possible to be defined by similar but different paths therefore policy implications to be drawn from those analyses should not ignore this feature of developing country analyses