Social evaluations when populations differ in size

Jean-Yves Duclos and Agnès Zabsonré

Canadian Journal of Economics, 2014, vol. 47, issue 2, 605-633

Abstract: Assessments of social welfare do not usually take into account population sizes. This can lead to serious social evaluation flaws, particularly in contexts in which policies can affect demographic growth. We develop in this paper a littleknown though ethically attractive approach to correcting the flaws of traditional social evaluations, an approach that is sensitive to population sizes and that is based on criticallevel generalized utilitarianism (CLGU). Traditional CLGU is extended by considering arbitrary orders of welfare dominance and ranges of poverty lines, as well as values for the critical level of how much a life must be minimally worth to contribute to social welfare. We apply these social evaluation methods to rank Canada across 1976, 1986, 1996 and 2006 and to estimate normatively and statistically robust lower and upper bounds of critical levels over which these rankings can be made.

JEL-codes: C18 D31 D63 I32 J64 O15 Q56 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2014
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