A review of Adler's "Measuring social Welfare"

Antoinette Baujard

No 2113, Working Papers from Groupe d'Analyse et de Théorie Economique Lyon St-Étienne (GATE Lyon St-Étienne), Université de Lyon

Abstract: This paper is a book review of Matthew Adler's bool "Measuring Social Welfare: An Introduction", published at OUP in 2019. The book is an introduction to the social welfare function approach, meant to assess social welfare and help public decision making, as a comprehensive and welcome alternative to cost-benefit analysis. The review first provides a number of references to situate the contribution of the book in the literature. Secondly, it insists on the fact that the social welfare approach is able to express transparently normative criteria, by contrast with CBA. Thirdly, it highlights that, after the focus on efficiency, the book well illustrates how to incorporate wider distributive criteria; it also enables to encompass different kinds of public policies beyond fiscal redistribution. Fourthly, it regrets that the book does not yet illustrate how to cope with the diversity of values and relevant information beyond utility and income, however introduced as theoretically possible.

Keywords: Welfare economics; social welfare function; social welfare approach; efficiency; distribution (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D63 I30 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-hpe and nep-upt
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
ftp://ftp.gate.cnrs.fr/RePEc/2021/2113.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:gat:wpaper:2113

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers from Groupe d'Analyse et de Théorie Economique Lyon St-Étienne (GATE Lyon St-Étienne), Université de Lyon Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Nelly Wirth ( this e-mail address is bad, please contact ).