On the foundations of well-being economics and policy

When one wishes to implement public policies, there is a previous need of comparing different actions and valuating and evaluating them to assess their social attractiveness. Recently the concept of well-being has been proposed as a multidimensional proxy for measuring societal prosperity and progress; a key research topic is then on how we can measure and evaluate this plurality of dimensions for policy decisions. This paper defends the thesis articulated in the following points: 1. Different metrics are linked to different objectives and values. To use only one measurement unit (on the grounds of the so-called commensurability principle) for incorporating a plurality of dimensions, objectives and values, implies reductionism necessarily. 2. Point 1) can be proven as a matter of formal logic by drawing on the work of Geach about moral philosophy. This theoretical demonstration is an original contribution of this article. Here the distinction between predicative and attributive adjectives is formalised and definitions are provided. Predicative adjectives are further distinguished into absolute and relative ones. The new concepts of set commensurability and rod commensurability are introduced too. 3. The existence of a plurality of social actors, with interest in the policy being assessed, causes that social decisions involve multiple types of values, of which economic efficiency is only one. Therefore it is misleading to make social decisions based only on that one value. 4. Weak comparability of values, which is grounded on incommensurability, is proved to be the main methodological foundation of policy evaluation in the framework of well-being economics. Incommensurability does not imply incomparability; on the contrary incommensurability is the only rational way to compare societal options under a plurality of policy objectives. 5. Weak comparability can be implemented by using multi-criteria evaluation, which is a formal framework for applied consequentialism under incommensurability. Social Multi-Criteria Evaluation, in particular, allows considering both technical and social incommensurabilities simultaneously.

Institutions, Public Debt and Foreign Finance

We study the role of domestic financial institutions in sustaining capital flows to the private and public sector of a country whose government can default on its debt. As in recent public debt crises, in our model public defaults weaken banks' balance sheets, disrupting domestic financial markets. This effect leads to a novel complementarity between private capital inflows and public borrowing, where the former sustain the latter by boosting the government's cost of default. Our key message is that, by shaping the direction of private capital flows, financial institutions determine whether financial integration improves or reduces government discipline. We explore the implications of this complementarity for financial liberalization and debt-financed bailouts of banks. We present some evidence consistent with complementarity.

The Middle East in the American quest for world order : ideas of power, economics, and social development in United States foreign policy, 1953-1961

Doctoral dissertation, University of Tampere

House Building and Personal Finance-A Study of Salaried Employees in Kerala

School of Management Studies,Cochin University of Science and Technology

La London School of Economics and Political Science.

Historia de la evolución de la famosa escuela de ciencias políticas y económicas, London School of Economics and Political Sciencie, centrándonos en las actividades puramente académicas desde su nacimiento, y en las labores llevadas a cabo por los sucesivos directores: W. A. Hewins, Halford J. Mackinder, W. Pember Reeves, Sir William Beveridge y A. M. Carr-Saunders.

Sources of airline and aircraft finance

Presentation Outline - Internal vs external sources of finance - Long versus short-term finance - Bonds, deentures and convertibles - The term loan - Manufacturers’ support - Export credits - Summary

Integrating socio-economics and ecology: a taxonomy of quantitative methods and a review of their use in agro-ecology

Answering many of the critical questions in conservation, development and environmental management requires integrating the social and natural sciences. However, understanding the array of available quantitative methods and their associated terminology presents a major barrier to successful collaboration. We provide an overview of quantitative socio-economic methods that distils their complexity into a simple taxonomy. We outline how each has been used in conjunction with ecological models to address questions relating to the management of socio-ecological systems. We review the application of social and ecological quantitative concepts to agro-ecology and classify the approaches used to integrate the two disciplines. Our review included all published integrated models from 2003 to 2008 in 27 journals that publish agricultural modelling research. Although our focus is on agro-ecology, many of the results are broadly applicable to other fields involving an interaction between human activities and ecology. We found 36 papers that integrated social and ecological concepts in a quantitative model. Four different approaches to integration were used, depending on the scale at which human welfare was quantified. Most models viewed humans as pure profit maximizers, both when calculating welfare and predicting behaviour. Synthesis and applications. We reached two main conclusions based on our taxonomy and review. The first is that quantitative methods that extend predictions of behaviour and measurements of welfare beyond a simple market value basis are underutilized by integrated models. The second is that the accuracy of prediction for integrated models remains largely unquantified. Addressing both problems requires researchers to reach a common understanding of modelling goals and data requirements during the early stages of a project.

Informal finance and rural finance policy in India: historical and contemporary perspectives

From the 1950s up to the early 1990s the All-India data show an ever-declining share of informal credit in the total outstanding debt of rural households. Contemporaneous micro-level studies, using more qualitative research methodologies, provide evidence that questions the strength of this trend, and more recent All-India credit surveys show, first, a levelling, and then a rise, in the share of rural informal credit in 1990/91 and 2000/01, respectively. By reference to findings of a study of village moneylenders in Rajasthan, the paper notes lessons to be drawn. First, informal financial agents have not disappeared from the rural financial landscape in India. Second, formal-sector financial institutions can learn much about rural financial service needs from the financial products and processes of their informal counterparts. Third, a national survey of informal agents, similar to that of the 1921 Census survey of indigenous bankers and moneylenders, would provide valuable pointers towards policy options for the sector. A recent Reserve Bank of India Report on Moneylender Legislation not only explores incentive mechanisms to better ensure fair practice, but also proposes provision for a new category of loan providers that would explicitly link the rural informal and formal financial sectors.

the implication of social cognition for experimental economics From the issue entitled "Special issue on Experimental economics and the social embedding of economic behavior and cognition"

Can human social cognitive processes and social motives be grasped by the methods of experimental economics? Experimental studies of strategic cognition and social preferences contribute to our understanding of the social aspects of economic decisions making. Yet, papers in this issue argue that the social aspects of decision-making introduce several difficulties for interpreting the results of economic experiments. In particular, the laboratory is itself a social context, and in many respects a rather distinctive one, which raises questions of external validity.

On collective intentions: collective action in economics and philosophy

Philosophers and economists write about collective action from distinct but related points of view. This paper aims to bridge these perspectives. Economists have been concerned with rationality in a strategic context. There, problems posed by “coordination games” seem to point to a form of rational action, “team thinking,” which is not individualistic. Philosophers’ analyses of collective intention, however, sometimes reduce collective action to a set of individually instrumental actions. They do not, therefore, capture the first person plural perspective characteristic of team thinking. Other analyses, problematically, depict intentions ranging over others’ actions. I offer an analysis of collective intention which avoids these problems. A collective intention aims only at causing an individual action, but its propositional content stipulates its mirroring in other minds.