Consumer welfare beyond GDP

Antoine Germain ()
Additional contact information
Antoine Germain: Université catholique de Louvain, LIDAM/CORE, Belgium

No 2025011, LIDAM Discussion Papers CORE from Université catholique de Louvain, Center for Operations Research and Econometrics (CORE)

Abstract: Inageneralconsumptionspacewhereagentsmaydifferintheirpreferences,endowments and prices, this paper builds a theory of consumer welfare on axioms reflecting the ethics of equality of opportunity: unequal budgets create welfare-relevant inequalities but heterogeneous preferences do not. When combined with an appropriate cross-economy robustness condition, these axioms single out a consumer welfare measure. Like aggregate consumption in national accounts, this measure sums up individual expenditure functions. Unlike national accounts, these functions are evaluated at a common price vector for all individuals. I show that standard measures of cost of living, standards of living, and purchasing power parity can be modified to reflect welfare as equality of opportunity without additional data.

Pages: 21
Date: 2025-05-28
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://dial.uclouvain.be/pr/boreal/en/object/bore ... tastream/PDF_01/view (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:cor:louvco:2025011

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in LIDAM Discussion Papers CORE from Université catholique de Louvain, Center for Operations Research and Econometrics (CORE) Voie du Roman Pays 34, 1348 Louvain-la-Neuve (Belgium). Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Alain GILLIS ().