Population-Adjusted Egalitarianism

Egalitarianism focuses on the well-being of the worst-off person. It has attracted a lot of attention in economic theory, for instance when dealing with the sustainable intertemporal allocation of resources. Economic theory has formalized egalitarianism through the Maximin and Leximin criteria, but it is not clear how they should be applied when population size may vary. In this paper, I present possible justifications of egalitarianism when considering populations with variable sizes. I then propose new versions of egalitarianism that encompass many views on how to trade-off population size and well-being. I discuss some implications of egalitarianism for optimal population size. I first describe how population ethical views affects population growth. In a model with natural resources, I then show that utilitarianism always recommend a larger population for low levels of resources, but that this conclusion may not hold true for larger levels.

Magnitude effect in intertemporal allocation tasks

Intertemporal choices are affected by both discount rate and utility curvature. We investigate how the two aspects of time preference are affected by the size of the total budget using an intertemporal allocation task. At the aggregate level as well as at the individual level, we find magnitude effects both on the discount rate and on intertemporal substitutability (i.e., utility curvature). Individuals are more patient when dealing with larger budgets and also regard larger budgets to be more fungible. The latter effect suggests that the degree of asset integration is increasing in the stake.

Is Generosity Time-Inconsistent? Present Bias across Individual and Social Contexts

We investigate dynamically inconsistent time preferences across contexts with and without interpersonal trade-offs. In a longitudinal experiment, participants make a series of intertemporal allocation decisions of real-effort tasks between themselves and another person. Our results reveal that agents are present-biased when making choices that only affect themselves but not when choosing for others. Despite this asymmetry, we find no evidence for time-inconsistent generosity, i.e., when choices involve trade-offs between own and other's consumption. Structural estimations reveal no individual-level correlation of present bias across contexts. Discounting in social situations thus seems to be conceptually different from discounting in individual situations.

BALANCING THE INTERESTS OF ECONOMIC AND ENVIRONMENTAL SUBSYSTEMS OF STATE REGULATION OF SUSTAINABLE NATURE

The article states that based on an analysis of national wealth, the long-term coherence of environmental and economic factors expedient to determine its structure and dynamics, since the effects of irrational nature, pollution, etc., may be to a certain extent economically justified - the loss of natural capital as one of the components of the national wealth offset by an increase of its other components. A scientific and methodical approach to the determination of the efficiency of intertemporal allocation of natural resources and practical aspects of its application in the management of natural resources. Keywords: public administration, national wealth, natural resources, resources, factors.

The Resource Curse Hypothesis in Lao Economy

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the adaptability of the resource curse hypothesis for Lao economy. The study verifies the two crowding-out logics that resource abundance would crowd out manufacturing activities and/or savings and investment, by examining their causalities and impulse responses in a vector auto-regression (VAR) model estimation. The estimation outcomes implied the existence of the resource curse in Lao economy: resource production has crowded out manufacturing activities through real exchange rate appreciation, thereby causing the Dutch Disease; and resource production has not contributed significantly to capital accumulation, thereby being not consistent with Hartwick-rule. The study contributed to the literature by verifying two kinds of crowding-out logics on the resource curse by applying a VAR model: the crowding-out of manufacturing activities as a sectoral allocation, and the crowding-out of savings and investment as an intertemporal allocation. The study might also be valuable to the policy makers, since it proposed a strategy for transforming Lao economic structure from “resource curse” to “resource blessing” by setting up some institutional framework to allocate resource revenues to infrastructure development.