Intertemporal Social Evaluation

Charles Blackorby, Walter Bossert and David Donaldson

Cahiers de recherche from Centre interuniversitaire de recherche en économie quantitative, CIREQ

Abstract: Intertemporal social-evaluation rules provide us with social criteria that can be used to assess the relative desirability of utility distributions across generations. The trade-offs between the well-being of different generations implicit in each such rule reflect the underlying ethical position on issues of intergenerational equity or justice. We employ an axiomatic approach in order to identify ethically attractive social evaluation procedures. In particular, we explore the possibilities of using welfare information and non-welfare information in a model of intertemporal social evaluation. We focus on the individuals’ birth dates and lengths of life as the relevant non-welfare information. As usual, welfare information is given by lifetime utilities. It is assumed that this information is available for each alternative to be ranked. Various weakenings of the Pareto principle are employed in order to allow birth dates or lengths of life (or both) to matter in social evaluation. In addition, we impose standard properties such as continuity and anonymity and we examine the consequences of an intertemporal independence property. For each of the Pareto conditions employed, we characterize all social-evaluation rules satisfying it and our other axioms. The resulting rules are birth-date dependent or lifetime-dependent versions of generalized utilitarianism. Furthermore, we discuss the ethical and axiomatic foundations of geometric discounting in the context of our model.

Keywords: intergenerational equity and justice; intertemporal social choice; welfarist and non-welfarist social evaluation (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D63 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 25 pages
Date: 2005
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

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Related works:
Chapter: Intertemporal Social Evaluation (2007)
Working Paper: Intertemporal Social Evaluation (2005)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:mtl:montec:06-2005

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