Public choice and public health

Prenatal Screening, Reproductive Choice, and Public Health

One widely held view of prenatal screening (PNS) is that its foremost aim is, or should be, to enable reproductive choice; this is the Pure Choice view. The article critiques this position by comparing it with an alternative: Public Health Pluralism. It is argued that there are good reasons to prefer the latter, including the following. (1) Public Health Pluralism does not, as is often supposed...

Public Health Public Health

Methods The number of cases of death were obtained from the 2002 and 2005 Mortality Database and population data from the Population Census 2002. Standardized sex specific rates of non-traumatic and traumatic mortality in 2002 and 2005 were calculated in relation to the European standard population. We presented population pyramid and aging index for both populations in 2002 and compared sex sp...

Information and Public Choice

Happiness and Public Choice

Measuring individual welfare using data on reported subjective well-being has made great progress. It offers a new way of confronting public choice hypotheses with field data, e.g. with respect to partisan preferences on unemployment and inflation or rents in the public bureaucracy. Insights from public choice also help to assess the role of happiness measures in public policy. We emphasize tha...

Paternalism and public choice

There is an apparent contradiction in the economic approach to government policy. On one hand, neoclassical economists are champions of ‘consumer sovereignty’. This is the idea that individuals are the best judges of what is in their interests and should be able to make their own decisions. For example, economists would tend to oppose a regulation that required airbags to be installed in new ca...