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Is Global Social Welfare Increasing? a Critical-Level Enquiry

Author

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  • John Cockburn
  • Jean-Yves Duclos
  • Agnès Zabsonré
Abstract
We assess whether global social welfare has improved in the last decades despite (or because of) the substantial increase in global population. We use for this purpose a relatively unknown but simple and attractive social evaluation approach called critical-level generalized utilitarianism (CLGU). CLGU posits that social welfare increases with population size if and only if the new lives come with a level of living standards higher than that of a critical level. Despite its attractiveness, CLGU poses a number of practical difficulties that may explain why the literature has left it largely unexplored. We address these difficulties by developing new procedures for making partial CLGU orderings. The headline result is that we can robustly conclude that world welfare has increased between 1990 and 2005 if we judge that lives with per capita yearly consumption of more than $1,248 necessarily increase social welfare; the same conclusion applies to Sub-Saharan Africa if and only if we are willing to make that same judgement for lives with any level of per capita yearly consumption above $147. Otherwise, some of the admissible CLGU functions will judge the last two decades’ increase in global population size to have lowered global social welfare.

Suggested Citation

  • John Cockburn & Jean-Yves Duclos & Agnès Zabsonré, 2014. "Is Global Social Welfare Increasing? a Critical-Level Enquiry," Cahiers de recherche 1421, CIRPEE.
    • Handle: RePEc:lvl:lacicr:1421
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    Cited by:

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    2. Jean‐Yves Duclos & Bouba Housseini, 2015. "Quality, quantity and duration of lives," Canadian Journal of Economics/Revue canadienne d'économique, John Wiley & Sons, vol. 48(1), pages 1-27, February.
    3. Jean-Yves Duclos & Bouba Housseini, 2015. "Does Quality, Quantity and Duration of Lives," Cahiers de recherche 1501, Chaire de recherche Industrielle Alliance sur les enjeux économiques des changements démographiques.
    4. Jean-Yves DUCLOS & Bouba HOUSSEINI, 2015. "Quality, Quantity and Duration of Lives," Working Papers P118, FERDI.
    5. Jean-Yves Duclos & Luca Tiberti, 2016. "Multidimensional poverty indices: A critical assessment," Cahiers de recherche 1602, CIRPEE.
    6. Jean-Yves Duclos & Bouba Housseini, 2015. "Quality, Quantity and Duration of Lives," CIRANO Working Papers 2015s-12, CIRANO.
    7. A.V. Popov & T.S. Soloveva, 2021. "The Present and Future of the Employment Paradigm in the Context of Global Changes," Journal of Applied Economic Research, Graduate School of Economics and Management, Ural Federal University, vol. 20(2), pages 327-355.

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    More about this item

    Keywords

    Global welfare; Critical-level generalized utilitarianism; Social evaluation; Welfare dominance; Critical level; Population growth;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • D31 - Microeconomics - - Distribution - - - Personal Income and Wealth Distribution
    • D63 - Microeconomics - - Welfare Economics - - - Equity, Justice, Inequality, and Other Normative Criteria and Measurement
    • I32 - Health, Education, and Welfare - - Welfare, Well-Being, and Poverty - - - Measurement and Analysis of Poverty
    • O15 - Economic Development, Innovation, Technological Change, and Growth - - Economic Development - - - Economic Development: Human Resources; Human Development; Income Distribution; Migration
    • Q56 - Agricultural and Natural Resource Economics; Environmental and Ecological Economics - - Environmental Economics - - - Environment and Development; Environment and Trade; Sustainability; Environmental Accounts and Accounting; Environmental Equity; Population Growth

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