Health, Longevity, and Welfare Inequality of Older Americans

We estimate the distribution of well-being among the older U.S. population using an expected utility framework that incorporates differences in consumption, leisure, health, and mortality. We find large disparities in welfare that have increased over time. Incorporating the cost of living with poor health into elderly welfare substantially increases the overall inequality. Disparity measures based on cross-sectional income or consumption underestimate the growth in aggregate welfare inequality. Moreover, health is a better indicator of an individual's relative welfare position than income or consumption.

Migration Policy in the Context of Sustainable Development

The issues of sustainable development are related to the need in order to reduce poverty, inequality, insecurity, inclusion of immigrants in the system of education and health care, which contradicts the effective long-term solution of the global goals of EU migration policy. The aim of the research is to study the effectiveness of migration policy in the context of sustainable development on the example of EU countries in order to formulate proposals for overcoming the problems of inequality and poverty as priority goals. The results of the research complement the theory of the new economics of labour migration, considering this concept as a way to maximize income and reduce the risk of revenue through education, higher wages and a way to get better health and education services, access to developed infrastructure. However, the heterogeneity of the effects of migration is also reflected in the inability to obtain health services and access to the education system due to the high cost. All this exacerbates the problems of inequality and poverty due to the imbalance of both income and the cost of social services in different EU countries. It has been determined that the policy of integration of immigrants does not ensure the achievement of the goal of inclusive and equitable socialeconomic welfare. Inequality, in particular, gender one remains the main problem of sustainable development through illegal employment and different levels of remuneration. It has been proved that training should be considered in the context of sustainable development as providing access to the education system and programs. Despite the growing participation in educational programs and training of immigrants, the problems of inequality and poverty remain a priority for ensuring sustainable development.

Refinancing the Rentier State: Welfare, Inequality, and Citizen Preferences toward Fiscal Reform in the Gulf Oil Monarchies

Against the backdrop of fiscal reform efforts in Middle East oil producers, this article proposes a general framework for understanding how citizens relate to welfare benefits in the rentier state and then tests some observable implications using original survey data from the quintessential rentier state of Qatar. Using two novel choice experiments, we ask Qataris to choose between competing forms of economic subsidies and state spending, producing a clear and reliable ordering of welfare priorities. Expectations derived from the experiments about the individual-level determinants of rentier reform preferences are then tested using data from a follow-up survey. Findings demonstrate the importance of non-excludable public goods, rather than private patronage, for upholding the rentier bargain.

Inequality: Do Not Disperse

Many egalitarians incorporate a concern for interpersonal welfare inequality as part of their favored axiology – that is, they take it to be a bad-making feature of outcomes. It is natural to think that, if inequality is in this sense a bad, it is an impersonal bad (one that makes an outcome worse, while not in itself being worse for any person). This natural thought has been challenged. Some writers claim that egalitarian judgments can be accommodated by adopting an expanded view of a person's good, according to which being worse off than others is one of the factors that, in itself, makes one's life go worse. The putatively impersonal bad of inequality is thereby “dispersed” among individuals. I argue that this dispersion strategy fails. In a slogan: if you care about inequality, do not disperse it.

Modeling maladaptation in the inequality–environment nexus

Adaptation against environmental degradation has the potential to generate further environmental pressures. Does this aspect of adaptation affect the inequality–environment link? To answer this question, we develop a one-sector and one-input model which integrates threats to social and environmental sustainability posed by feedback effects of agents’ adaptation strategies. We distinguish between income inequality and welfare inequality with the latter depending on environmental quality, leisure time, income level and allocation of income to consumption or adaptation. Despite its parsimony, the model describes the conditions for the existence of different inequality–environment dynamic regimes. The model confirms the standard view that environmental degradation exacerbates welfare inequality, but it also produces non-trivial and surprising insights. It illustrates that income inequality affects the type of dynamic regime followed by the economy. High-income economies and economies with high-income inequality are most at risk of following a pattern of maladaptive growth with increasing welfare inequality and environmental pressure.