EconPapers    
Economics at your fingertips  
 

Public Economics after The Idea of Justice

Anthony Atkinson

Journal of Human Development and Capabilities, 2012, vol. 13, issue 4, 521-536

Abstract: In this first lecture in honour of Amartya Sen, I examine the lessons that can be drawn from The Idea of Justice for public economics and the extent to which public economics has already moved in the direction advocated by Sen. More specifically, I focus on the current fiscal austerity programmes, and how the tools of public economics can be used to contribute to public reasoning about such programmes. I argue that they can help us think about the balance between cutting spending and raising taxes, and about the key role of public investment. But the Sen critique of welfare economics mean that we have to re-think public economics. The subject has been slow to absorb new ideas for the evaluative basis, and public economics, while extending its positive analysis to allow for international interactions, has failed to develop a normative approach to global justice.

Date: 2012
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (5)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1080/19452829.2012.703171 (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:taf:jhudca:v:13:y:2012:i:4:p:521-536

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.tandfonline.com/pricing/journal/CJHD20

DOI: 10.1080/19452829.2012.703171

Access Statistics for this article

Journal of Human Development and Capabilities is currently edited by Kathryn Rosenblum

More articles in Journal of Human Development and Capabilities from Taylor & Francis Journals
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chris Longhurst ().

 
Page updated 2025-03-20
Handle: RePEc:taf:jhudca:v:13:y:2012:i:4:p:521-536