General Framework: Policy Making as a Problem with Multiple Criteria

Francisco André, Manuel Alejandro Cardenete () and Carlos Romero ()
Additional contact information
Carlos Romero: Technical University of Madrid Research Group: Economics for a Sustainable Environment

Chapter Chapter 1 in Designing Public Policies, 2010, pp 1-8 from Springer

Abstract: Abstract This chapter underlines some limitations of the traditional approach to public policy making. First, it is troublesome to find an expression for a social welfare function because of information requirements and the technical difficulties associated with the aggregation of preferences. Second, observed policy practice does not appear to be consistent with the existence of a well-defined social welfare function. On the contrary, policy design seems to be targeted to the improvement of economic performance as measured by a number of conflicting indicators. Based on this evidence, we set out to provide an alternative, more pragmatic approach to policy making. In this chapter we introduce a recent line of research that we have developed in which policy design is modelled as a decision problem with several objectives using multiple criteria techniques. This approach requires a structural model of the economy, such as a computable general equilibrium model, some multicriteria techniques to address the policy design problem and to identify the key set of policy instruments and policy objectives. All these elements are analysed and developed throughout the rest of the book.

Keywords: Fiscal Policy; Policy Instrument; Policy Objective; Social Welfare Function; Policy Design (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2010
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

There are no downloads for this item, see the EconPapers FAQ for hints about obtaining it.

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:spr:lnechp:978-3-642-12183-8_1

Ordering information: This item can be ordered from
http://www.springer.com/9783642121838

DOI: 10.1007/978-3-642-12183-8_1

Access Statistics for this chapter

More chapters in Lecture Notes in Economics and Mathematical Systems from Springer
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().