No full-text available
To read the full-text of this research,
you can request a copy directly from the authors.
Population Policy through Tradable Procreation Rights
Abstract
Tradable permits are now widely used to control pollution. We investigate the implications of setting up such a system in another field -- population control --, either domestically or at the global level. We first generalize the framework with both tradable procreation allowances and tradable procreation exemptions, in order to tackle both over- and under-population problems. The implications of procreation rights for income inequality and education are contrasted. With procreation exemptions or procreation allowances that would be expensive enough, resources are redistributed from the rich to the poor. In contrast, cheap procreation allowances redistribute resource towards the rich. As far as human capital is concerned, natalist policy would be bad for education, while population control would be good. If procreation rights are granted in proportion to existing fertility levels (grandfathering) instead of being allocated uniformly, population control can be made more redistributive. On the whole, procreation rights offer an interesting alternative to both coercive population control in developing countries and pronatalist policies in the developed world
Upon introducing heterogeneity and dynamics into a model of the demand for children, a problem of optimal population is defined and analyzed. It is shown that from the perspective of social welfare, better-educated individuals produce too few children while less-educated individuals produce too many children and all individuals invest too little in the education of their children. The impact of several policy tools geared at addressing the "population problem" is investigated, in particular how child allowances and other tax-subsidy policies can be harnessed to enhance welfare, and how and why early childhood education programs can mitigate the "population problem." Copyright © 2008 the Economics Department of the University of Pennsylvania and the Osaka University Institute of Social and Economic Research Association.
Evidence provided by the scientific community strongly suggests that limits should be placed on greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. This means that states, firms, and individuals will have to face potentially serious burdens if they are to implement these limits. Which principles of justice should guide a global regime aimed at reducing greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions originating from human activities, and most notably from CO 2 emissions? This is both a crucial and difficult question. Admittedly, perhaps this question is too ambitious, given the uncertainties and complexities characterizing the issue of climate change. Yet, rather than listing them all at this stage, let us address the question in a straightforward manner, introducing some of these complexities as the need arises.
We explore the consequences of liberalized credit markets for growth and in-equality in a lifecycle economy with physical and human capital accumulation, populated by households of different abilities, and calibrated to match the long-run economic performance of a panel of emerging countries. Relatively modest improvements in extending credit to the ablest households appear to have large economic consequences: upfront costs (slower initial growth, higher income in-equality) followed by delayed benefits (faster long-run growth). Reform also low-ers lifecycle utility for a substantial majority of currently active households. Pre-mature liberalization in the least developed countries (low TFP or capital intensity) may redirect economic growth towards a poverty trap.. 1 We thank participants to seminars in Toulouse, Stockholm, Louvain-la-Neuve, Ghent, Marseilles and Venice (CESIfo) as well as R. Anderson, M. Cervellati, F. Heylen, and two anonymous referees for their comments on an earlier draft.
This paper compares trends in male and female hourly wage inequality in the United Kingdom and the United States between 1979 and 1998. Our main finding is that the extent and pattern of wage inequality became increasingly similar in the two countries during this period. We attribute this convergence to 'U.S. style' reforms in the U.K. labour market. In particular, we argue that the much steeper decline in unionisation in the United Kingdom explains why inequality increased faster than in the United States. For women, we conclude that the fall and subsequent recovery in the real value of the U.S. minimum wage explains why wage inequality increased faster in the United States than in the United Kingdom during the 1980s, while the opposite happened during the 1990s. Interestingly, the introduction of the National Minimum Wage in the U.K. in 1999 also contributed to the convergence in labour market institutions and wage inequality between the two countries.
We review the empirical evidence on the relationship between Trade Liberalization, Inequality, and Poverty based on the analysis of micro data from several developing countries that underwent significant trade reforms in recent years. Despite many measurement and identification difficulties, and despite conflicting evidence on some issues, empirical work based on country case studies' has established certain patterns that seem common across countries and trade liberalization episodes, and may hence be informative as to how developing countries adjust to trade reform.
The 1990 Clean Air Act Amendments initiated the first large-scale use of the tradable permit approach to pollution control. The theoretical case for this approach rests on the assumption of an efficient market for emission rights. The authors' empirical analysis shows that the emission rights market created by the 1990 Amendments had become reasonably efficient by mid-1994. They also show that the auctions specified in the Amendments to jump-start trading had become a small part of the overall market. Finally, the authors demonstrate that the strategic bidding behavior discussed in the literature has had no effect on market prices. Copyright 1998 by American Economic Association.
The article, set in the context of the below-replacement fertility levels now recorded by most advanced countries, examines the feasibility of raising fertility through the implementation of pronatalist policies. -P.Compton
The world is awash in refugees. According to the most recent estimates, more than fifteen million individuals are already outside their countries and in need of international protection and assistance. This population, already immense, is growing steadily and remorselessly with the proliferation of refugee-producing and migration-facilitating conditions: political repression, armed conflict, civil strife, environmental disaster, famine, social and economic disintegration, wretched governmental policies, and improvements in communications and transportation opportunities. Refugee emergencies have become so endemic that the rhetoric of crisis today is as likely to numb as it is to energize.
A search is under way for a theory that can accommodate our intuitions in population axiology. The object of this search has proved elusive. This is not surprising since, as we shall see, any welfarist axiology that satisfies three reasonable conditions implies at least one of three counter-intuitive conclusions. I shall start by pointing out the failures in three recent attempts to construct an acceptable population axiology. I shall then present an impossibility theorem and conclude with a short discussion of how it might be extended to pluralist axiologies, that is, axiologies that take more values than welfare into account.
Developing countries with highly unequal income distributions, such as Brazil or South Africa, face an uphill battle in reducing inequality. Educated workers in these countries have a much lower birth rate than uneducated workers. Assuming children of educated workers are more likely to become educated, this fertility differential increaases the proportion of unskilled workers, reducing their wages, and thus their opportunity cost of having children, creating a vicious cycle. A model incorporating this effect generates multiple stedy-state levels of inequality, suggesting that in some circumstances, temporarily increasing access to educational opportunities could permanently reduce inequality. Empirical evidence suggests that the fertility differential between the educated and uneducated is greater in less equal countries, consistent with the model.
An earlier version of this paper was published in the AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 1999 and is also available here.
This paper is devoted to the study of the Pareto-efficiency of the competitive equilibrium for an overlapping generations
economy with endogenous fertility. Pareto-efficiency needs a reformulation when fertility is endogenous. Then it is proved
that a competitive equilibrium that converges in over-accumulation is non-Pareto-efficient. However, we provide an example
in which a competitive equilibrium that converges in under-accumulation is non-Pareto-efficient. Finally, we give a general
condition that ensures the Pareto-efficiency of the competitive equilibrium.
This paper presents a market design for the management of noise disturbance created by aircraft traffic around large airports. A market for tradable noise permits allows noise generators to compensate harmed residents. We show that the noise permit markets allow the achievement of the planner's optimal allocation of flights provided that she/he does not over-weight the benefit of economic activity compared to the disutility of noise disturbances. The fact that zones are likely to be strategic players does not fundamentally alter this finding. Because of the market auctioneer's information constraints, noise permits are likely to redistribute windfall gains to residents located in non-critical zones. This entices landlords to increase their land/house rents there and to design smaller houses in the long run.
PIP
In 1964 the economist Kenneth Boulding suggested marketable licenses for babies as a form of fertility control. The idea was not treated seriously or in-depth at the time, but events of 1974 and recession have forced the American people to confront problems posed by continual population increase. Boulding never proposed enforcement regulations for his project. Public opinion might create voluntary compliance, but that is unlikely. One proposal for monitoring births is to administer a drug at puberty so that it would produce long-term sterility reversible only through injection of another drug. If the government could purchase child licenses it could also regulate extensively and precisely the rate of population increase. Since an immediate end to natural increase in the U.S. is unattainable despite fertility no higher than replacement level, the variation in the crude birth and death rates can exist despite the fact that the cohort net reproduction rate stays constant. Boulding's proposal makes no mention of age of licensing. If women were given a license to have a baby before age 25, total future population growth could be reduced. Boulding suggested each woman receive child-license units in the form of deci-child units and provide enough deci-child units so that, on average, each cohort of women would exactly reproduce itself.
Upon introducing heterogeneity and dynamics into a model of the demand for children, a problem of optimal population is defined and analyzed. It is shown that from the perspective of social welfare, better-educated individuals produce too few children while less-educated individuals produce too many children and all individuals invest too little in the education of their children. The impact of several policy tools geared at addressing the "population problem" is investigated, in particular how child allowances and other tax-subsidy policies can be harnessed to enhance welfare, and how and why early childhood education programs can mitigate the "population problem." Copyright © 2008 the Economics Department of the University of Pennsylvania and the Osaka University Institute of Social and Economic Research Association.
We develop a new theoretical link between inequality and growth. In our model, fertility and education decisions are interdependent. Poor parents decide to have many children and invest little in education. A mean-preserving spread in the income distribution increases the fertility differential between the rich and the poor, which implies that more weight gets placed on families who provide little education. Consequently, an increase in inequality lowers average education and, therefore, growth. We find that this fertility-differential effect accounts for most of the empirical relationship between inequality and growth. (JEL J13, O40)
In this paper, we generalize the notion of Pareto efficiency to make it applicable to environments with endogenous populations. Two efficiency concepts are proposed: 𝒫-efficiency and 𝒜-efficiency. The two concepts differ in how they treat potential agents that are not born. We show that these concepts are closely related to the notion of Pareto efficiency when fertility is exogenous. We prove a version of the first welfare theorem for Barro-Becker type fertility choice models and discuss how this result can be generalized. Finally, we study examples of equilibrium settings in which fertility decisions are not efficient, and we classify them into settings where inefficiencies arise inside the family and settings where they arise across families. Copyright The Econometric Society 2007.
China's one-child-per-couple policy represents an extraordinary attempt to engineer national wealth, power, and global standing by drastically braking population growth. Despite the policy's external notoriety and internal might, its origins remain obscure. In the absence of scholarly research on this question, public discourse in the United States has been shaped by media representations portraying the policy as the product of a repressive communist regime. This article shows that the core ideas underlying the one-child policy came instead from Western science, in particular from the Club of Rome's world-in-crisis work of the early 1970s. Drawing on research in science studies, the article analyzes the two notions lying at the policy's core-that China faced a virtual "population crisis" and that the one-child policy was "the only solution" to it-as human constructs forged by specific groups of scientists working in particular, highly consequential contexts. It documents how the fundamentally political process of constituting population as an object of science and governance was then depoliticized by scientizing rhetorics that presented China's population crisis and its only solution as numerically describable, objective facts. By probing the human and historical character of population research, this article underscores the complexity of demographic knowledge-making and the power of scientific practices in helping constitute demographic reality itself. Copyright 2003 by The Population Council, Inc..
The Price of Silence: Tradable Noise Permits and Airports
- T And
- P Picard
BRÉCHETBR´BRÉCHET, T., AND P. PICARD, "The Price of Silence: Tradable Noise Permits and Airports,"
CORE Discussion Papers 2007045, UniversitéUniversit´Université catholique de Louvain, 2007.
Negro Suffrage: The Constitutional Point of View
- J Rose
ROSE, J., "Negro Suffrage: The Constitutional Point of View," American Political Science
Review 1 (1906), 17-43.