Is Global Social Welfare Increasing? a Critical-Level Enquiry

John Cockburn, Jean-Yves Duclos and Agnès Zabsonré

Cahiers de recherche from CIRPEE

Abstract: We assess whether global social welfare has improved in the last decades despite (or because of) the substantial increase in global population. We use for this purpose a relatively unknown but simple and attractive social evaluation approach called critical-level generalized utilitarianism (CLGU). CLGU posits that social welfare increases with population size if and only if the new lives come with a level of living standards higher than that of a critical level. Despite its attractiveness, CLGU poses a number of practical difficulties that may explain why the literature has left it largely unexplored. We address these difficulties by developing new procedures for making partial CLGU orderings. The headline result is that we can robustly conclude that world welfare has increased between 1990 and 2005 if we judge that lives with per capita yearly consumption of more than $1,248 necessarily increase social welfare; the same conclusion applies to Sub-Saharan Africa if and only if we are willing to make that same judgement for lives with any level of per capita yearly consumption above $147. Otherwise, some of the admissible CLGU functions will judge the last two decades’ increase in global population size to have lowered global social welfare.

Keywords: Global welfare; Critical-level generalized utilitarianism; Social evaluation; Welfare dominance; Critical level; Population growth (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D31 D63 I32 O15 Q56 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2014
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (8)

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Journal Article: Is global social welfare increasing? A critical-level enquiry (2014)
Working Paper: Is Global Social Welfare Increasing? a Critical-Level Enquiry (2014)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:lvl:lacicr:1421

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