Endogenous fertility and modified Pareto-optimality

Günther Herbert Lang

Portuguese Economic Journal, 2005, vol. 4, issue 3, 191 pages

Abstract: In a world of endogenous fertility, where the number of descendants is an integral part of the economic allocation, the traditional concept of Pareto-optimality cannot be applied any longer: the number of individuals to be present on earth may vary between any two allocations we wish to compare. Therefore, the concept needs to be modified in order to give new life to the discussion of economic efficiency. This work introduces a straightforward variation of the Pareto-principle and characterizes the optimality of economic allocations according to this concept. It is shown that some of the well-known traditional results on intertemporal optimality do no longer hold. In particular, lump-sum tax instruments (or the rearrangement of initial endowments) are no longer a sufficient tool to achieve efficiency. Copyright Springer-Verlag Berlin/Heidelberg 2005

Keywords: Endogenous fertility; Modified Pareto-optimality; Dynamic efficiency (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2005
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (8)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1007/s10258-005-0046-2 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

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:portec:v:4:y:2005:i:3:p:171-191

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer. ... cs/journal/10258/PS2

DOI: 10.1007/s10258-005-0046-2

Access Statistics for this article

Portuguese Economic Journal is currently edited by Luís F. Costa

More articles in Portuguese Economic Journal from Springer, Instituto Superior de Economia e Gestao
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().