The experience of industry policy in the wider Asian region contrasts significantly with many of the neoliberal policy prescriptions prevalent in Australia today. Using the automotive industry as a comparative case study, this article compares industry policy in three demographic and geographic giants of the region: China, India and Indonesia. China’s dominant position has benefited from a highly ‘interventionist’ industry policy which places strict conditions on foreign carmakers in joint ventures. This policy has also influenced the emergence of a thriving domestic industry, with state-owned enterprises leading the way. While India has also emerged as a major auto producer, its industry policy has moved away from the joint venture model since the 1990s, with fully foreign-owned operations now playing a much bigger role. In contrast, Indonesia retains a version of the joint venture model while local industry is dominated by Japanese capital. The record of industry policy in these countries challenges the idea that more ‘liberal’ economic systems lead to stronger domestic industries or firms.

This paper reviews UK supply-side policies since 2010 in terms of their impact on growth and considers medium-term growth prospects in the context of the puzzle of disappointing post-crisis TFP performance. It is argued that there is no reason to believe that growth prospects have deteriorated significantly compared with the pre-crisis period. Changes in policy under the Coalition government are unlikely to have made a big difference to growth potential. On the one hand, this means opportunities for radical reform have been ignored; on the other hand, there has been no repeat of the 1930s’ debacle.

The paper discusses the relationship between two problems, namely: (i) assigning a value to reduction in death probabilities, i.e. defining a « value of life », and (ii) assigning a value to changes in population, i.e. defining guidelines for the ethics and economics of population. While, for Broome, “in one sense, prolonging a person’s life and adding a new person to the world are alternative ways of doing the same things”, this paper argues that the two problems are quite distinct, in the sense that a precise answer to the first provides no guide live at all for second, and conversely. There is no inconsinstency in providing safety according to a high “value of life” while giving population growth a negative value. But there is a methodological link: both problemes have a public choice dimension, and can therefore be approached along parallel methodological lines. With respect to the economics and ethics of population, the paper offers some defense of the Pareto criterion among the living, and comments on the practice and theory of social choise.

In his Tanner Lecture of 1979 called Equality of What? Amartya Sen asked what metric egalitarians should use to establish the extent to which their ideal is realised in a given society. In this study I comment on answers to Sen’s question in recent philosophical literature. I describe and criticize what a number of authors (and notably Rawls and Sen) of egalitarian persuasion have said about the dimension(s) or respect(s) in which people should be made more equal, when the price in other values of moving towards greater equality is not intolerable.

This essay explores Sen’s claim that rights-realization can be consequentially evaluated. Supporting this claim, it attempts to show that the value pluralism thereby presupposed is sufficient to render superfluous the idea — advanced by Sen and others — of ‘agent-relativity’ as a structural feature of ethical judgment.

Consider the domain of economic environments E whose typical element is ξ = (U1, U2, Ω, ω*), where ui are Neumann-Morgenstern utility functions, Ω is a set of lotteries on a fixed finite set of alternatives, and ω* ∈ Ω. A mechanism f associates to each ξ a lottery f(ξ) in Ω. Formulate the natural version of Nash’s axioms, from his bargaining solution, for mechanisms on this domain. (e.g., IIA says that if ξ′ = (U1, U2, Δ, ω′), Δ ⊂ Ω, and f ∈ Δ then f(ξ′) = f(ξ).) It is shown that the Nash axioms (Pareto, symmetry, IIA, invariance w.r.t. cardinal transformations of the utility functions) hardly restrict the behavior of the mechanism at all. In particular, for any integer M, choose M environments ξi, i = 1, … , M, and choose a Pareto optimal lottery ωi ∈ Ωi, restricted only so that no axiom is directly contradicted by these choices. Then there is a mechanism f for which f(ξi) = ωi, which satisfies all the axioms, and is continuous on E.

The paper surveys, without proofs, recent axiomatic results on the utilization of common property resources, by this author and some others. Problems discussed include the division of unproduced commodities (the traditional fair division problem), and the cooperative production of a private or public good.

Axioms contrast No Envy with two monotonicity properties, respectively when the population owning the resources in common increases, and when these resources themselves grow.

People vary in both tastes and talents. What is the most sensible formulation of the egalitarian ideal once this fact is fully taken into account? The paper examines a number of answers that have been offered to this question, in particular Ronald Dworkin’s counterfactual insurance schemes, and argues against them. It then presents an alternative proposal. The latter generalizes Bruce Ackerman’s notion of undominated genetic diversity, it can be interpreted as a condition of potential envy-freedom, and it is consistent with, though more specific than, Amartya Sen’s capability-based approach.

This paper analyzes the optimal allocation of a given antipoverty budget consistent with various usual measures of poverty. It is shown that it is generally optimal to give all the budget either to the poorest or to the richest of the poor. It is only with the Sen index of poverty that it is sometimes optimal to combine both types of allocation. This property may be related to the normalization rule used in the derivation of that measure and sheds some new light on the axiomatics of poverty measurement.

This article presents a proof of Arrow’s Theorem which highlights the theorem’s relationship to welfarism and which emphasizes its underlying geometric structure. In addition, this method of proof is adapted to provide a proof of a single-preference-profile version of Arrow’s Theorem. The relationship between Arrovian social choice theory and Bergson-Samuelson welfare economics is also considered.

The paper explores the notion of freedom of choice which is of considerable importance in welfare economics and the theory of social choice. Three plausible axioms are introduced for ranking alternative opportunity sets in terms of the degrees of freedom that they offer to the agent making choices. It is shown that, under these axioms, judgements about degrees of freedom of choice have to be based on the naive principle of simply counting the number of available options.