why organic food in germany is a merit good abstract the conventional view of welfare economics is that subsidies for organic food are inefficient this paper challenges this view and argues that subsidies for organic food may be justified by the concept of individualistic merit goods therefore the concept of individualistic merit goods is briefly reviewed market preferences and reflective preferences for organic food in germany are described it is then shown how they relate to political preferences finally it is argued how economic theory in general and food policy in particular should take account of the existence of merit goods

sustainability policy and environmental policy a theoretical representative agent economy with a depletable resource stock polluting emissions and productive capital is used to contrast environmental policy which internalises externalised environmental values with sustainability policy which achieves some form of intergenerational equity the obvious environmental policy comprises an emissions tax and a resource stock subsidy each equal to the respective external cost or benefit sustainability policy comprises an incentive affecting the choice between consumption and investment and can be a consumption tax capital subsidy or investment subsidy or a combination thereof environmental policy can reduce the strength of the sustainability policy needed more specialised results are derived in a small open economy with no environmental effects on utility

any non welfarist method of policy assessment violates the pareto principle reply the public at large many policymakers and a number of economists hold views of social welfare that are non welfarist that is they attach some importance to factors other than the effects of policies on individuals utilities we show however that any non welfarist method of policy assessment violates the pareto principle

reimbursement schemes for hospitals the impact of case and firm characteristics we contribute to the debate on high powered versus low powered incentives in regulation by studying their heterogeneous impacts on different subpopulations using data from the introduction of a hi

sustainability of diets from concepts to governance abstract the production of food for consumption produces environmental stress and raises ethical issues as humans are able to choose different foodstuffs in their diets food consumption guidance may have large benefits for the environment meat consumption is often identified as the most environmentally harmful foodstuff to produce and animal welfare and rights issues are receiving ever more attention by combining both issues this article proposes a conceptual framework for combining alternative dietary habits and agricultural production styles in general environmental policy strategies two means to lower meat consumption are proposed 1 redeveloping the pigouvian food taxation system introduced by goodland 1997 in which foodstuffs are taxed according to their environmental burden an elaborated version could also include an ethical tax that incorporates consumers attitudes on animal welfare and a coefficient that takes into account the inherent value of animals 2 taking the composition of a national stockpile as a starting point and designing the agricultural production system from a combined environmental and ethical perspective in this system the environmentally and ethically preferable foodstuffs would be purchased by the government and sold to the global markets the premiums between these two prices would constitute the subsidies for the national production

sustainability as opportunity this paper explores the relationship between sustainability concepts and contractarian principles of distributional fairness a commitment to equality of opportunity between contemporaries entails that life opportunities should be nondiminishing from generation to generation defining sustainability as nondeclining utility is analytically suggestive but practically problematic given the uncertainties that surround future preferences and technologies life opportunities may be sustained however by providing future generations with specific endowments of reproduced capital technological capacity natural resources and environmental quality in this setting capital resource substitutions are defensible only if there is compelling evidence that they would benefit both present and future generations

environmental impacts of changes to healthier diets in europe food consumption causes together with mobility shelter and the use of electrical products most life cycle impacts of consumption meat and dairy are among the highest contributors to environmental impacts from food consumption a healthier diet might have less environmental impacts using the e3iot environmentally extended input output database developed in an eu study on environmental impacts of products eipro this paper estimates the difference in impacts between the european status quo and three simulated diet baskets i e a pattern according to universal dietary recommendations the same pattern with reduced meat consumption and a mediterranean pattern with reduced meat consumption production technologies protein and energy intake were kept constant though this implies just moderate dietary shifts impact reductions of up to 8 were possible in reduced meat scenarios the slightly changed food costs do not lead to significant first order rebound effects second order rebounds were estimated by applying the capri partial equilibrium model this analysis showed that european meat production sector will most likely respond by higher exports to compensate for losses on the domestic meat market higher impact reductions probably would need more drastic diet changes 2011 elsevier b v

economics and sustainability balancing trade offs and imperatives the concept of sustainability has been increasingly invoked in scholarly and public policy debates discussion has been hampered however by uncertainty and lack of uniformity in the meaning of sustainability this paper seeks to identify some common ground among economists ecologists and environmen tal ethicists two issues seem salient require ments for intergenerational and the defi nition of social capital to be provided to future generations a concept of safe minimum standard which has received at least some recognition in the ecology philosophy and eco nomics literatures may provide the beginnings of a common ground for debate about sus tainability jel q2

an alternative way to model merit good arguments abstract besley j public econ 35 1988 371 uses a scaling approach to model merit good arguments in commodity tax policy in this paper i question this approach on the grounds that it produces wrong recommendations taxation subsidisation of merit demerit goods whenever the demand for the de merit good is inelastic i propose an alternative approach that does not suffer from this deficiency and that allows for a straightforward interpretation

a mixed bentham rawls criterion for intergenerational equity theory and implications abstract this paper proposes a welfare criterion that balances the need for development and the concern for the least advantaged generations and explores its implications this criterion called the mixed bentham rawls criterion moderates the effect of discounting yet permits some degree of intertemporal trade off it is a weighted average of two terms a the sum of discounted utilities and b the utility level of the least advantaged generation we derive necessary conditions to characterize growth paths that satisfy our criterion and show that in some models with familiar dynamic specifications an optimal path exists and displays appealing characteristics

the impact of immigration on child health experimental evidence from a migration lottery program this paper uses a unique survey designed by the authors to compare migrant children who enter new zealand through a random ballot with children in the home country of tonga whose families were unsuccessful participants in the same ballots the authors find that migration increases height and reduces stunting of infants and toddlers but also increases body mass index bmi and obesity among 3 to 5 years old these impacts are quite large even though the average migrant household has been in new zealand for less than 1 year additional results suggest that these impacts occur because of dietary change rather than direct income effects

behavioral environmental economics promises and challenges environmental issues provide a rich ground for identifying the existence and consequences of human limitations in this paper we present a growing literature lying at the interface between behavioral and environmental economics this literature identifies alternative solutions to traditional economic instruments in environmental domains that often work imperfectly but it also faces a set of challenges including the difficulty of computing welfare effects and the identification of a robust environmental policy based on context dependent socio psychological effects we illustrate our critical discussion with two behavioral schemes that have been widely implemented green nudges and corporate environmental responsibility

a simple model for merit good arguments abstract in this paper we examine a way of representing merit goods by allowing governments to apply a specific form of correction to consumers preferences the model builds upon an approach to the analysis of taste and quality change due to fisher and shell we look at the first best allocation of resources where this is done we also consider second best policies in which the government must charge the same price to all consumers of the merit good and when optimal lump sum transfers are not available

rawlsian intergenerational justice as a markov perfect equilibrium in a resource technology the rawlsian maximin criterion is combined with nonpaternalistic altruistic preferences in a nonrenewable resource technology the maximin programme is shown to be time inconsistent for a subset of initial conditions a solution to this intergenerational conflict is found under a given assumption as a generically unique subgame perfect equilibrium

when the public good conflicts with an apparent preference for unsustainable behaviour abstract the example of peatlands is used to demonstrate the challenges facing the sustainable management of natural resources in situations where the fragility of an environment is not appreciated by all stakeholders we reveal through the use of a survey applying both contingent valuation and discrete choice experiments that many local people and others within the wider population value peatlands as an example of a cultural landscape however there is a reluctance to stop extracting peat for domestic fuel even though the activity is undermining the ecological sustainability of this same landscape this resistance is shown to arise because the cutting of peat is a well established land use and a cessation of peat cutting is perceived to require the abandonment of traditional rights in addition the activity is widely regarded as more benign than industrial scale cutting for energy the value attached to the landscape is an opportunity for conservation policy but for this to succeed there must be an acknowledgement of local interests

optimal sin taxes abstract we investigate sin taxes on unhealthy items such as fatty foods that people may by their own reckoning consume too much of we employ a standard optimal taxation framework but replace the standard assumption that all consumers have 100 self control with an assumption that some consumers may have some degree of self control problems we show that imposing taxes on unhealthy items and returning the proceeds to consumers can generally improve total social surplus because such taxes counteract over consumption by consumers with self control problems while at the same time they naturally redistribute income to consumers with no self control problems who consume less such taxes can even create pareto improvements finally we demonstrate with some simple numerical examples that even if the population exhibits relatively few self control problems optimal taxes can still be large

when individual preferences defy sustainability can merit good arguments close the gap in this paper we discuss how merit good arguments may contribute to discussions about sustainability to this end we clarify how merit good arguments deviate from individual preferences and relate the justification for deviations from individual preferences to two conceptions of well being an informed preference satisfaction and a perfectionist conception building on this framework we analyze how merit good arguments can be helpful for discussing sustainability as justice what challenges merit good arguments pose to future generations and whether they can serve as a normative justification for green nudges the analysis yields two main insights first a reflection on the concept of merit goods is helpful in sorting out the different justifications that sustainability interventions may rely on in particular it allows separating the challenges of redistribution internalization of externalities and increasing individual consumption of particular merit goods such as health care or education more clearly second the precise notion of merit goods by itself however only offers a limited contribution and does not represent a blank check to justify deviations from individual preferences

regulation competition and liberalization in many countries throughout the world regulators are struggling to determine whether and how to introduce competition into regulated industries this essay examines the complexities involved in the liberalization process while stressing the importance of case specific analyses this essay distinguishes liberalization policies that generally are procompetitive from corresponding anticompetitive liberalization policies

sustainability constraints versus optimality versus intertemporal concern and axioms versus data sustainable sustained or survivable development are defined here as distinct sustainability constraints on intertemporal distribution in a context which ignores uncertainty environmental and intratemporal concerns such constraints are neither self contradictory nor redundant for they can conflict with maximizing the present value of utility optimality nor inferior since the axioms underlying optimality are ethically arbitrary and refuted by empirical psychological data axiomatic arguments may clarify but cannot resolve debates about intertemporal concerns data suggest that sustainability constraints are not respected and that intertemporal welfare functions containing a preference for sustained improvement may better reflect what bodies politic mean by sustainability

optimal redistributive taxation when government s and agents preferences differ abstract paternalism merit goods and specific egalitarianism are concepts we sometimes meet in the literature the thing in common is that the policy maker does not fully respect the consumer sovereignty principle and designs policies according to some other criterion than individuals preferences using the self selection approach to tax problems developed by stiglitz stiglitz j e 1982 self selection and pareto efficient taxation journal of public economics 17 213 240 and stern stern n h 1982 optimum taxation with errors in administration journal of public economics 17 181 211 the paper provides a characterization of the properties of an optimal redistributive mixed tax scheme in the general case when the government evaluates individuals well being using a different utility function than the one maximized by private agents

market reasoning as moral reasoning why economists should re engage with political philosophy abstract in my book what money can t buy the moral limits of markets 2012 i try to show that market values and market reasoning increasingly reach into spheres of life previously governed by nonmarket norms i argue that this tendency is troubling putting a price on every human activity erodes certain moral and civic goods worth caring about we therefore need a public debate about where markets serve the public good and where they don t belong in this article i would like to develop a related theme when it comes to deciding whether this or that good should be allocated by the market or by nonmarket principles economics is a poor guide deciding which social practices should be governed by market mechanisms requires a form of economic reasoning that is bound up with moral reasoning but mainstream economic thinking currently asserts its independence from the contested terrain of moral and political philosophy if economics is to help us decide where markets serve the public good and where they do