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We model the welfare consequences of mandates that restrict investors to hold firms with net-zero carbon emissions. To qualify for these mandates, value-maximizing firms have to accumulate decarbonization capital. Qualification lowers a firm's required return by its decarbonization investments divided by Tobin's q, that is, the greenium or the dividend yield shareholders forgo to address the global-warming externality. The welfare-maximizing mandate approximates the first-best solution, yielding welfare gains compared to laissez-faire by mitigating the weather disaster risks resulting from carbon emissions. Our model generates optimal transition paths for decarbonization that we use to evaluate proposed net-zero targets. Authors have furnished an Internet Appendix , which is available on the Oxford University Press Web site next to the link to the final published paper online [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Hausman and McPherson provide an evidential defense of welfare economics, arguing that preferences are not constitutive of welfare but nevertheless provide the best evidence for what promotes welfare. Behavioral economics identifies several ways in which some people's preferences exhibit anomalies that are incoherent or inconsistent with rational choice theory. I argue that the existence of these behavioral anomalies calls into question the evidential defense of welfare economics. The evidential defense does not justify preference purification, or eliminating behavioral anomalies before conducting welfare analysis. But without doing so, the evidential defense yields implausible welfare implications. I discuss how the evidential defense could be modified to accommodate behavioral anomalies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The existence of self-control failures is often used to legitimize public policy interventions. The argument is that reducing self-control failures can make people better off, as judged by themselves. However, there is only scarce evidence on the frequency and welfare costs of self-control failures. This paper presents a survey method that allows us to measure self-control failures in everyday life and to identify their welfare costs in terms of associations with experienced subjective well-being. We present novel survey evidence using this method and discuss its implications for behavioural welfare economics and behavioural public policy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article confronts strands of thought in environmental ethics with environmental economics. Three approaches in ethics are addressed: that pointing to the rights of individual natural entities, the holistic approach, and the relational approach of Human and Nature. They are confronted with three strands of thought in environmental economics: the welfare economics approach, the biophysical-centric approach, the relational economic approach. The confrontation of ethics and environmental economics allow us to draw some insights both for academic research and environmental policy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This research investigates how enhancing remittances affects total factor productivity (TFP) dynamics in Sub‐Saharan Africa. The Generalized Method of Moments empirical strategy is adopted for this study and the engaged TFP dynamics are: TFP, real TFP, welfare TFP, and real welfare TFP. Significant net effects are not apparent from enhancing remittances for TFP, real TFP growth, and welfare TFP while positive net effects are apparent on real welfare TFP. The unexpected findings are elucidated and policy implications are discussed. This study has complemented the attendant literature by assessing how growing remittances influence the dynamics of TFP in sub‐Saharan Africa. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: The COVID-19 pandemic has impacted the scope of health economics literature, which will increasingly examine value beyond health care interventions such as government policy and broad health system innovations. Aim: The study analyzes economic evaluations and methodologies evaluating government policies suppressing or mitigating transmission and reducing COVID-19, broad health system innovations, and models of care. This can facilitate future economic evaluations and assist government and public health policy decisions during pandemics. Methods: The Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic reviews and Meta-Analyses extension for Scoping Reviews (PRISMA-ScR) was used. Methodological quality was quantified using the scoring criteria in European Journal of Health Economics, Consolidated Health Economic Evaluation Reporting Standards (CHEERS) 2022 Checklist and the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence's (NICE) Cost Benefit Analysis Checklist. PUBMED, Medline, and Google Scholar were searched from 2020–2021. Results: Cost utility analysis (CUA) and cost benefit analysis (CBA) analyzing mortality, morbidity, quality adjusted life year (QALY) gained, national income loss, and value of production effectively evaluate government policies suppressing or mitigating COVID-19 transmission, disease, and impacting national income loss. The WHO's pandemic economic framework facilitates economic evaluations of social and movement restrictions. Social return on investment (SROI) links benefits to health and broader social improvements. Multi-criteria decision analysis (MCDA) can facilitate vaccine prioritization, equitable health access, and technology evaluation. Social welfare function (SWF) can account for social inequalities and population-wide policy impact. It is a generalization of CBA, and operationally, it is equal to an equity-weighted CBA. It can provide governments with a guideline for achieving the optimal distribution of income, which is vital during pandemics. Economic evaluations of broad health system innovations and care models addressing COVID-19 effectively use cost effectiveness analysis (CEA) that utilize decision trees and Monte Carlo models, and CUAs that effectively utilize decision trees and Markov models, respectively. Conclusion: These methodologies are very instructive for governments, in addition to their current use of CBA and the value of a statistical life analytical tool. CUA and CBA effectively evaluate government policies suppressing or mitigating COVID-19 transmission, disease, and impacts on national income loss. CEA and CUA effectively evaluate broad health system innovations and care models addressing COVID-19. The WHO's framework, SROI, MCDA, and SWF can also facilitate government decision-making during pandemics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of this article is to investigate how welfare stigma is produced and counteracted in the public sphere in a social democratic welfare regime. The Norwegian case represents a generous welfare state that historically has been thought to lessen and avoid stigma connected to welfare benefits. While studies have identified a hardening anti-welfare consensus and stigma production in liberal welfare regimes, we know less about how the connection between welfare benefits, stigma production and resistance has played out in the recent developments in the social democratic welfare regime context. Public debates give access to a dynamic political battleground where different actors participate, and we analyse six welfare-related national debates covered in Norwegian newspapers between 2010 and 2019. We identify key stakeholders, symbolic boundaries used to distinguish deserving from undeserving recipients, and we discuss the outcomes and wider functions of these debates. The debates contain moral aspects of welfare and allegations of fraud by recipients in general as well as by targeted groups such as Somali single mothers, refugees and young adults. We find that stigmatizing framings known from other national contexts also enter the Norwegian debates and illustrate how welfare stigma production plays a role in promoting more selective welfare policies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The history of philosophy is a history of moral circle expansion. This history correlates with a history of expansionism about consciousness. Recently, expansionism about consciousness has exploded: to invertebrates, to plants, to logic gates, and to fundamental entities. The last of these expansions stems from a surge of interest in panpsychism. In an exploratory spirit, this paper considers some largely uncharted territory: the ethical implications of panpsychism. Our conclusion is that while panpsychism probably does significantly expand our moral circle, it's also probably short on anything of practical significance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this short paper, we build a simple model where a non-welfarist social welfare function can be transformed into and thus be identical to a welfarist social welfare function in form. Our analysis first suggests that non-welfarist methods of policy assessment can also obey the Pareto principle. More broadly, our analysis is a useful input in thinking rigorously about the formal underpinnings of standard welfare economics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Traditional international trade theories seldom consider the pursuit of power as maintaining and enlarging a country's relative strength in the process of interstate competition. However, in the context of great power competition, the importance of power in the trade between advanced and latecomer countries has become more pronounced. Given this situation, we can establish a tractable and generalized international economic political framework for analyzing great power competition by introducing the power factor into classic two-country trade theory, treating the absolute welfare and relative welfare emphasized by economics and political science respectively as actors' dual objectives, and making use of game theory methods. It can be found that in a two-country game composed of an advanced and a latecomer country, the latter will prefer a strategy of "enhancing its own strength and rectifying its own weak points," while the former will favor a strategy that "worsens the other's weak points and enhances the other's strengths." Once the technological gap that determines comparative advantage narrows, the advanced country will tend to totally suppress the latecomer and even "decouple" from it. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Globally, Indigenous peoples are overrepresented in unemployment rates, low income, poverty, low education, and other social indicators. Mainstream measures to address these things still maintain the terms of the conversation within a colonial/neoliberal framework, perpetuating inequities and coloniality. We document an attempt to overcome this by Anishinaabe First Nations in the Canadian context via a decolonial labour market study. The study shows how quantitative methods and market failure analysis can be both decolonial and useful for policy analysis and implementation when such things are directed by Indigenous organizations and undertaken with community participation. These results contribute to the development of an Indigenous economics, or a decolonial economics, that begins with different assumptions and goals than would a mainstream market analysis, but that does not exclude the use of tools from welfare economics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Simple Summary: Lameness, an impaired gait, results from the pain dairy cows feel, which impacts their behaviour and performance, and consequently farmer income. Mobility scoring by visual inspection is the current gold standard in the UK for detecting this condition; however, it is prone to scoring biases and can only detect lameness once the cow feels pain, which may come too late for effective action to be taken. Conversely, the early detection of lameness allows for the better management and treatment of lameness cases, which is decisive in minimizing economic losses and animal pain, thereby improving cow welfare and the sustainability of the dairy industry. In a previous study, metabolites predictive of lameness were identified; however, the annotation of these metabolites has not yet been conducted. Although some annotation ambiguity is acceptable when performing untargeted analysis, accurately identifying compounds is crucial to understand which pathways are differentially altered between lame and non-lame cows. This study aimed to annotate the metabolites identified as predictors of lameness in the transition period and understand their biological role in the pathways and processes that lead to lameness. As a result, three metabolites predictive of lameness in dairy cows were identified at the highest confidence level, thus allowing for the understanding of the interactions between metabolism and immunity in lameness to be improved. The aim of this study was to identify with a high level of confidence metabolites previously identified as predictors of lameness and understand their biological relevance by carrying out pathway analyses. For the dairy cattle sector, lameness is a major challenge with a large impact on animal welfare and farm economics. Understanding metabolic alterations during the transition period associated with lameness before the appearance of clinical signs may allow its early detection and risk prevention. The annotation with high confidence of metabolite predictors of lameness and the understanding of interactions between metabolism and immunity are crucial for a better understanding of this condition. Using liquid chromatography–tandem mass spectrometry (LC-MS/MS) with authentic standards to increase confidence in the putative annotations of metabolites previously determined as predictive for lameness in transition dairy cows, it was possible to identify cresol, valproic acid, and gluconolactone as L1, L2, and L1, respectively which are the highest levels of confidence in identification. The metabolite set enrichment analysis of biological pathways in which predictors of lameness are involved identified six significant pathways (p < 0.05). In comparison, over-representation analysis and topology analysis identified two significant pathways (p < 0.05). Overall, our LC-MS/MS analysis proved to be adequate to confidently identify metabolites in urine samples previously found to be predictive of lameness, and understand their potential biological relevance, despite the challenges of metabolite identification and pathway analysis when performing untargeted metabolomics. This approach shows potential as a reliable method to identify biomarkers that can be used in the future to predict the risk of lameness before calving. Validation with a larger cohort is required to assess the generalization of these findings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article examines the nature of multidimensional concepts, such as democracy and welfare, and how their various underlying dimensions can be aggregated to form overall judgments and comparisons using social choice theory. Topics include the challenges of disparate measurement scales, the implications of Khmelnitskaya's impossibility theorem for aggregation, and the proposal of a qualitative framework to facilitate meaningful comparisons across different dimensions.

Worsening joblessness in India is put forward here from the multiple and interconnected argumentative lens of formal-informal dichotomy by labour productivity differential, market size constraint, labour market flexibility, capital inflows, political constraint, corporate industrialization and welfare economic implications. In the process, the limitations of the classic developmental ideas of Kuznets, Lewis and Schumpeter are critiqued. Thereafter, an alternative policy framework is proposed to achieve economic development focused on employment, equity and environmental uplift. The paper shows how the massive unemployment problem can be managed in India's democratic set up by departing from conventional wisdom about industrialization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores an important aspect of academic precarity: the use of fixed-term contract researchers as factotums within universities. The practice can be defined as the taking-on of tasks that are outside of core research activities, including substantial amounts of time spent teaching, supervising students and preparing research proposals, often at the behest of tenured staff members, reflecting existing power dynamics within the organisation. At a theoretical level, it is argued that this aspect of academic precarity reflects various forms of ambivalence in researchers' lives, creating tensions in addition to expanding their workloads. Using evidence from 54 interviews with researchers of at least five years' experience and based at research units in Portugal, conducted during 2022 and 2023, it is possible to illustrate various aspects of academic precarity and ambivalence, with different responses from researchers including acceptance of and resistance towards the factotum role. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper considers the trade-off between the demand for efficiency and the demand for meaningful work. It asks whether this trade-off should be treated as inevitable or potentially resolvable, at least under reformed conditions. It compares historical and contemporary debates where the trade-off features. It focuses initially on Adam Smith's account of the division of labour in which less meaningful work is assumed to be the necessary price of higher efficiency. It then examines Karl Marx's analysis of work, showing how it differs from that of Smith. Marx addressed the scope for achieving meaningful work whilst supporting needs fulfilment in a future socialist society. In addition, the paper looks at how the ideas of Smith and Marx relate to modern discussions that focus on the capacity of new digital technologies to lighten work. Finally, it draws lessons for welfare economics on how meaningful work and efficiency might be reconciled. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The U.S. health care system is often criticized for being the most expensive in the world while delivering mediocre health outcomes. While policymakers on both the right and left agree about the need for reform, they disagree strongly about whether that reform should involve a smaller role for government or a larger role. At the same time, the U.S.' high costs and mediocre health outcomes likely are at least partly attributable to lifestyle choices that occur outside of the health care system, creating another possible avenue for intervention. This introduction to the symposium on "Free Markets and Health Care" discusses how welfare economics provides a useful tool in evaluating the appropriateness of government involvement in markets related to health and health care. The papers in the symposium provide important new evidence to help inform debates about, for instance, regulations on health care providers and insurers, health insurance expansions, and policies designed to influence health behaviors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

First, Mahtani argues that both in the game The Mug and in the Sleeping Beauty we should not defer to a trusted person under a particular designation if they do not self-identify under this designation. This invites a more complex Reflection Principle. I respond that there are more parsimonious ways to avoid the challenges posed to the Reflection Principle. Second, Mahtani argues that preferences create a hyperintensional context, which poses a challenge to the Ex-Ante Pareto Principle that can be averted by supervaluation. I respond that such an appeal to supervaluation would block randomization as a fair allocation device. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It is nearly 40 years since an earlier survey on the use of distributional weights in Cost-Benefitcost–benefit analysis was first published. Since then, a number of significant contributions have been made in the literature. It is therefore timely to revisit the issue by focusing on the key reasons why distributional weights are so necessary. We present a new justification for using unequal income distributional weights in CBA, and and reaffirm a completely neglected reason for adopting distribution weights. We derive the weights from a formulation of the SWF. We specify the minimum value judgmentsjudgements for the SWF that everyone can agree on who accepts the fundamentals of welfare economics. As many CBA practitioners have ignored using distribution weights, inadequate attention has been given to how they can be estimated. The final objective of this paper is to highlight the main methods for estimating these weights, and and to present applications of these methods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the context of strategic interactions, individuals sometimes find themselves better off when they have fewer options. This mechanism is known under the name of 'strategic commitment', as it is usually the individuals themselves who 'commit' to following a certain course of action by restricting their options; but that is not necessary. I explain how a paternalistic intervention may be conceived where it is a third party who paternalistically restricts rational individuals' choices to improve their welfare. This kind of intervention, which I call 'strategic paternalism', contradicts the narrative according to which welfare economics is incompatible with paternalism because it assumes individual rationality, which would make paternalism irrelevant. To prove this point, I show why and in what sense this 'strategic paternalism' deserves to be called that way. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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The monstrous pendulum of inequality in the twenty-first century swings sideways amid welfare economics and egalitarianism. Horizontal inequalities embodied by pro-poor policy on grounds such as gender, race, and disability, have long been core international human rights concerns. Yet, gross inequalities in economic status, nationally and globally, are still poorly conceptualized by legal scholars, policymakers, and practitioners. In search of a policy lever, this Article argues that as far as economic theory goes, neither theoretical nor empirical economic research adequately correlates economic inequalities and growth. That is, beyond horizontal inequalities concerning the extreme poor. As economic research remains inept in offering efficiency policy justifications, international human rights law, as the primary legal alternative for poverty-related social justice, could fill the gap. In the backdrop of neoliberal welfare economic policy confines, vertical inequalities between societal groups and global inequalities between countries substantively add to a novel realization of human rights and the achievement of United Nations-led sustainable development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

When determining the optimal deductible level for an insurance policy, a policyholder faces two limitations. First, uncertainty arises from the randomness of future losses. Second, the opacity of the functional forms of the policyholder's loss distribution and utility function contributes to additional limitations. While the academic literature focuses on the former, we additionally include limited information on these functional forms in our model setting to reflect real-world decision-making. That is, we draw on an expected utility framework and analyze the relationship between optimal deductible levels under limited and full information. We also derive several decision rules under limited information in order to approximate the optimal deductible level under full information. To support real-world decision-making, these rules could be easily implemented in an online decision aid offered by an insurance broker, a comparison portal for insurance contracts or a consumer protection agency. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

People with disabilities are classified as marginalized and vulnerable to poverty. The condition of disability causes this group to experience accessibility barriers such as access to the fulfillment of the rights of persons with disabilities, especially in promoting disability welfare. Various factors are thought to be the cause of obstacles in achieving welfare. The purpose of this study is to analyze the factors that affect the economic welfare of persons with disabilities in Bengkulu Province. The analytical methods used are multiple linear regression and logistic regression. The results show that demographic factors such as domicile status, age, and number of household members affect the economic welfare of persons with disabilities. In addition, educational factors, Information and Technology skills, employment status, credit programs, government assistance (non-cash food assistance) also affect the economic welfare of persons with disabilities in Bengkulu Province. This is expected to be able to provide policy implications from local government agencies and other institutions in developing more effective and targeted programs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Miles' Law, i.e., the notion that institutional position affects attitudes, is considered a truism, but not much attention has been given to properly test or develop it. Here, we argue that Miles' Law is effective not only for civil servants but among municipal decision-makers in different positions. We examine how well institutional position can explain differences in attitudes to welfare service provision among decision-makers on different levels. Differences in opinion depending on institutional position are usually overlooked when attitudes on welfare are explained. Using survey data (N = 1,578) from 42 municipalities in Finland, our analyses show that institutional position does affect attitudes to service provision. However, the differences are contingent on the mode of service provision under consideration and are moderated by the size of the municipality and the economic status. This shows that it is important to consider the position of local government decision-makers to understand their attitudes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Understanding the factors influencing the enrichment of the behaviour of the common leopard (Panthera pardus) in a captive environment is crucial for promoting their well-being and enhancing conservation efforts. Lack of species-specific enrichment can lead to stress, disturbances, and altered behavioural patterns, including developing stereotypic behaviours. This study aims to assess the effect of different types of enrichment on the behaviour and welfare of four individual common leopards housed at the National Zoological Park, New Delhi. This study was conducted in two phases: the first phase i.e. pre-enrichment phase, in which the enclosures of leopards were studied with the existing infrastructure and facilities, and in the second phase, the enrichment was introduced in the leopard enclosures i.e. post-enrichment phase. We used focal and scan sampling methods for data collection during Phase I (Pre-enrichment phase) and Phase II (Post-enrichment). This study provides valuable insights into the relationship between different types of enrichment and behaviour in common leopards in captivity. The main results of the study highlighted that with no enrichment, all leopards exhibit more inactive and more stereotypic behaviour than in the presence of enrichment. However, with the use of different enrichment interventions, the leopard exhibits more active behaviour. This study will in turn form a basis for the development of effective management approaches to minimize stress and disturbances, enhance the welfare of the studied species, and support conservation efforts in zoos across the country. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Behavioural welfare economics has lately been challenged on account of its use of the satisfaction of true preferences as a normative criterion. The critique contests what is taken to be an implicit assumption in the literature, namely that true preferences are context-independent. This assumption is considered not only unjustified in the behavioural welfare economics literature but unjustifiable – true preferences are argued to be, at least sometimes, context-dependent. This article explores the implications of this 'critique of the inner rational agent'. I argue that the critique does not support a wholesale shift away from the use of true preferences as an evaluative standard in normative economics; instead, the critique implies that behavioural welfare economists need to inquire into and establish the 'source' of particular context-dependent choices in individuals' decision-making. The source determines the permissibility of correcting individuals' context-dependent choices and can, in some situations, support decisive welfare judgements. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this personal memoir of my lifelong collaborator and friend, Herb Gintis, I reflect on his "A Radical Analysis of Welfare Economics and Individual Development." Published in the Quarterly Journal of Economics in 1972, the article advances a novel Marx-inspired interpretation of the societal origins of preferences, one that profoundly influenced the ideas of a group of like-minded young economists at Harvard at the time, economics more broadly, and Herb and my subsequent joint work. JEL Classification: B14, B21, D01 [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using measures rooted in welfare economics, this article quantifies the economic consequences arising from occupational segregation by gender and migration status in twelve European countries. We also identify the most inclusive European labor markets by building counterfactual distributions. In particular, we remove cross-country differences in immigrants' origin, years of residence, and education, thus determining the contribution that these variables make to the geographical disparities. Our results reveal that the economic consequences of segregation are negative for most foreign workers, especially for immigrant women in Italy, Spain, Germany, and Slovenia. Portugal emerges as a reference point because immigrant workers have a better position compared to other countries, which does not seem to arise from their basic individual characteristics. Our analysis highlights the importance of policy actions aimed at improving the occupational sorting of immigrant workers, such as investing in skills development, avoiding occupational downgrading, and incorporating a gender perspective. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The economic role of an accounting regime is to increase welfare through its effects—in conjunction with complementary institutions—on firm and household behavior. I review three major streams of the archival literature (real effects; price effects, including value relevance; and costly contracting), in terms of what they can and cannot reveal as proxies for welfare effects. One conclusion is that the partial correlations and average effects that predominate in this literature have provided valuable insights into the role of accounting in the economy, but provide limited and misleading proxies for welfare effects. A major concern is that teachers, students, and researchers—indeed, regulators and standard setters—raised on this literature could lose sight of, and underestimate, the fundamental contribution of accounting to aggregate welfare. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The purpose of this research is i) to find out what unique traits make PM Modi an inspiring leader, ii) to assess if respondents' perceptions differ significantly, and iii) to create a conceptual framework of leadership traits so that we can better comprehend PM Modi's leadership styles. The study includes 19 leadership traits relevant to PM Modi's leadership styles, extracted from previous articles and expert discussions. This study collected quantitative data from LinkedIn connections using a random sampling procedure. A self-designed questionnaire was sent to 700 people from various backgrounds to rate their agreement or disagreement with 19 leadership traits. The study was conducted in March and February 2024, with 29% of the responses (203) available for analysis. The study reveals that the top ten leadership traits in ranking order include strong 'network building, "selfmotivation,' 'global perspective,' 'visionary leadership,' 'determination and result-orientation,' 'public direction communication skills,' 'proactive approach,' 'being organized (detailed-oriented),' 'integrity in the workplace,' and 'creative thoughts and thinking.' The results of the Mann-Whitney test revealed differences in respondents' assessments of PM Modi's leadership abilities in India and other countries. There are significant differences in the perceptions of educators and other groups regarding the five leadership traits that may be linked to the lack of trust in Indian society and culture. Additionally, the factor analysis produced a five-factor model: visionary and transformative; humanistic and value-driven; decisive and result-oriented; social influencer and opinion leader; and flexibility, adaptability, and dynamic. It appears that PM Modi's personality and leadership style are a perfect fit for the extended version of the Greatman hypothesis, which is the trait theory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

ABSTRACT Worsening joblessness in India is put forward here from the multiple and inter-connected argumentative lens of formal-informal dichotomy by labour productivity differential, market size constraint, labour market flexibility, capital inflows, political constraint, corporate industrialization and welfare economic implications. In the process, the limitations of the classic developmental ideas of Kuznets, Lewis and Schumpeter are critiqued. Thereafter, an alternative policy framework is proposed to achieve economic development focused on employment, equity and environmental uplift. The paper shows how the massive unemployment problem can be managed in India’s democratic set up by departing from conventional wisdom about industrialization.

How should we distinguish between ethical and unethical ways of pursuing profit in a market? The market failures approach (MFA) to business ethics purports to provide an answer to this question. I argue that it fails to do so. The source of this failure is the MFA's reliance on Pareto efficiency as a core ethical principle. Many ethically "preferred" tactics for seeking profit cannot be justified by appeal to Pareto efficiency. One important reason for this is that Pareto efficiency, as understood by the theory of welfare economics upon which the MFA relies, assumes a static conception of efficiency. This is a problem because many ethically "preferred" tactics can only be justified by appeal to dynamic efficiency considerations. I argue that, instead of Pareto efficiency, we should look to the value of wealth creation to understand the ethical constraints on how market actors may pursue profit. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article assesses the impact of investments in the digitization of service organizations on population well-being indices across Russia’s regions. The relevance of the study is reduced to the fact that in the context of digitalization of the economy there is a dynamic development of the service sector, which becomes a driver of the growth of the quality and standard of living of the population. The purpose of the study is to determine the presence of economic effects from investments in digitalization that contribute to the improvement of the level and quality of life of the population in the region. The objectives of the study are theoretically justify the selection of indicators for assessing the well-being of the regional population, investments in the digitalization of service organizations depending on the type of region, and the calculation of digital effects. Methods of assessment of par correlations, typology, and panel data used to conduct spatial-time analysis. 85 regions of Russia were selected as the objects of study, and the research period includes the pre-pandemic and pandemic period, the impact of which led to an increase in investment in digital technologies in the service sector. The study tested the scientific hypothesis that investment in the digitalization of the service sector contributes to an increase in the volume of services, their availability and their quality, which, in turn, leads to an increase in the well-being of the population. The analysis carried out did not allow us to fully confirm the hypothesis, since there are differences between regions and types of services. The novelty of the study is in the formed spatial-time models, reflecting the relationship between investment in the digitalization of the services sphere and the factors determining the quality of life of the population of the regions of Russia. The analysis did not fully support the hypothesis, as there were differences between regions and types of services. It concluded that the investment increased the population’s use of computer equipment and service volumes, as well as their ability to save more money and use services for managing their personal finances.

We assess the consequences for market quality and welfare of different entry regimes and exchange pricing policies. To do so, we integrate a microstructure model with a free-entry, exchange competition model where exchanges have market power in technological services. Free-entry delivers superior liquidity and welfare outcomes vis-á-vis an unregulated monopoly, but entry can be excessive or insufficient. Depending on the extent of the monopolist's technological services undersupply compared to the first best, a planner can achieve a higher welfare controlling entry or platform fees. Review of Financial Studies, forthcoming [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Countries increasingly form alliances to collectively impose sanctions. However, the resulting impact of such coordination remains unclear. Analyzing the 2014 wave of sanctions against Russia over 400,000 simulations with a quantitative trade model, this report demonstrates that multilateral cooperation through coalitions simultaneously reduced domestic welfare losses incurred from sanctions and intensified welfare losses imposed on Russia. Results also reveal significant disparities within the coalition, with Russia sanctions placing relatively high economic costs on Baltic nations that can be mitigated through a burden-sharing program. Hypothetical cooperation by emerging economies like China is also shown to substantially raise the force of sanctions against Russia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Driven by the quality of sources rather than their representativeness, the history of English agriculture has been written primarily from the perspective of well-documented large farms to the neglect of smallholders and cottagers who for centuries cultivated the greater part of the nation's farmland but left scant records. The superb series recording the mediocre and low crop yields of the expansive demesnes of great lords has long been adopted for the productivity of all medieval England's arable and is deeply embedded in economic and social histories and calculations of economic growth and the welfare of the population. Yet no convincing justification for this supposition has ever been made, and an increasing flow of research and analysis indicates that the productivity of land varied markedly in accordance with the size and function of farms, with the output per acre of large farms constrained by the need to control costs in order to sell surpluses at a profit, while smallholders, at the cost of low and frequently abysmal labour productivity, produced higher yields by striving to maximize output using abundant family labour to secure subsistence from meagre acreages. An appraisal of farming across the centuries and the continents from the Middle Ages to modern times clearly shows that an inverse relationship generally prevailed between farm size and land productivity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The "beautiful viviparous fly", Wohlfahrtia magnifica, may have a magnificent appearance due to its striking morphology; however, it is a potentially deadly agent of obligate traumatic myiasis in humans and animals, with a serious impact on welfare and economics. The fly is found across the Palearctic realm, including the Western Balkan region, with reports from former Yugoslavian countries from the first half of the 20th century. In this paper, a recent case of wohlfahrtiosis recorded in Northern Serbia is evidenced using morphological and molecular techniques. Larvae were collected from two adult sheep with severe hoof myiasis and two young sheep with genital and interdigital myiasis. Morphological identification was performed for adults bred from the infested vulva and third-stage larvae (L3) collected from the hoof wounds, supported with barcoding sequences of the COI gene obtained from larval pairs from the hoof wounds of older and the genitalia of younger sheep. W. magnifica was identified according to the appearance of male fly terminalia and the morphology of L3, which was confirmed after the comparison of representative sequences of the COI gene (deposited in GenBank™ under accession numbers MT027108–MT027114) to those available in GenBank™. This finding represents the first reported case of wohlfahrtiosis in the Western Balkans in 80 years, highlighting the need to re-inform relevant stakeholders to achieve adequate disease control. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Behavioral welfare economics usually aims at mere means paternalism, helping agents better pursue their own goals. This paper discusses one initially promising way to inform policies addressed at agents who violate expected utility theory (EUT), namely what I call "CPT debiasing." I argue that this approach is problematic even if we grant the normative authority of EUT, the descriptive adequacy of CPT (cumulative prospect theory), and the general acceptability of means paternalism. First, it is doubtful whether the CPT utility function measures what its proponents intend. Second, by imposing risk neutrality on agents, the approach involves a more problematic paternalism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The access of rural societies to welfare opportunities and resources is at the core of policy and research agendas. The persistent ruralurban gap increases the risks of exclusion and is a challenge that rural dwellers tackle by bolstering their mobility to access labour markets, resources and services. The car has become a vector in the connections and transformations that sustain rural life; however, this mobility is also a source of new fractures in social and territorial cohesion. This paper explores how the rural mobility system has been shaped and analyses its impact on these societies. The results suggest integrating the issue of mobility into rural policies from a more complex sociological perspective, addressing demographic challenges, regional development and territorial cohesion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

More than 18.5 million current smokers in the United States usually smoke menthol cigarettes. The Food and Drug Administration recently proposed a tobacco product standard to prohibit menthol as a characterizing flavor in cigarettes. We explore whether there are internality‐based market failures that provide an applied welfare economics rationale to prohibit menthol. Our empirical approach provides descriptive evidence from the 2018 to 2019 Tobacco Use Supplement to the Current Population Survey on how menthol use is associated with smokers' market demand along multiple intensive and extensive margins. We also use measures of smoking‐related misinformation and internalities, and stated preference data, from a 2021 Cornell Online Survey. We acknowledge that the associations we document in observational data might reflect bias due to self‐selection into menthol use. We leave it to the reader whether there is convincing evidence that differential levels of internality‐based market failures are a sufficient justification for the proposed prohibition of menthol cigarettes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]