Unequal inequality aversion within and among countries and generations

Marc Fleurbaey and Stéphane Zuber

Documents de travail du Centre d'Economie de la Sorbonne from Université Panthéon-Sorbonne (Paris 1), Centre d'Economie de la Sorbonne

Abstract: Suppose that, for whatever reason, it is decided that inequalities within countries are more offensive than inequalities between countries, and that inequalities between populations living together are more offensive than inequalities between generations living in different times. Can a social welfare function express that preference? We show that it is actually difficult to in corporate such a localist preference into a social welfare function, except in a limited way (i.e., from a situation of specific similarity between countries). We also show that in order to obtain such preferences, the relative size of inequality aversion within and between countries may be counter-intuitive in some relevant cases, in the sense that a greater inequality aversion may happen to be required across countries than within countries. This research highlights new social welfare functions that aggregate the outcomes of evaluations over pairs of agents

Keywords: inequality aversion; transfer principle; within-country preference (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D04 D63 D64 D78 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 25 pages
Date: 2023-10
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-dem and nep-upt
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://mse.univ-paris1.fr/pub/mse/CES2023/23014.pdf (application/pdf)
https://shs.hal.science/halshs-04270021

Related works:
Working Paper: Unequal inequality aversion within and among countries and generations (2023)
Working Paper: Unequal inequality aversion within and among countries and generations (2023)
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:mse:cesdoc:23014

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Documents de travail du Centre d'Economie de la Sorbonne from Université Panthéon-Sorbonne (Paris 1), Centre d'Economie de la Sorbonne Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Lucie Label ().