In fiscal year 1982, Federal, State, and local governments spent $592.6 billion for public social welfare purposes.r This was an increase of $42.1 billion, or 7.6 percent, over the amount spent on social welfare the previous year. Measured in constant dollars, such expenditures rose 1.7 percent from 1981 to 1982. Social welfare spending represented 19.3 percent of Gross National Product (GNP) i...

Recent research suggests that welfare attitudes may be shaped by negative perceptions of blacks, suggesting an implicit racialization of the policy. But what might inhibit the racialization of welfare? In this vein, research indicating that education facilitates tolerance suggests that negative racial perceptions and welfare attitudes may be less related among the educated. However, education m...

I analyse the equilibrium and welfare properties of an economy characterised by uncertainty and payoff externalities, in a general model which nests several applications. Agents receive a private signal and an endogenous public signal, which is a noisy aggregate of individual actions. I analyse how endogenous public information, which causes an information externality, combines with payoff exte...

Both the public and the international institutions that regulate the veterinary profession have high expectations that veterinarians will understand and take the lead in issues of animal welfare. These expectations provide a powerful argument for the need to teach animal welfare. The objective of this paper is to share the experiences of animal welfare teaching in South America, examining which...

This paper reviews the procedures and protocols necessary for the development of a practical programme for the assessment and implementation of animal welfare on farms and in other commercial situations. An effective programme must incorporate measures of both husbandry and welfare. Most current systems are based almost entirely on measures of husbandry provision, e.g. resources and management....

This paper shows that the design of education policy involves a potential conflict between welfare and social mobility. We consider a setting in which social mobility is maximized under the least elitist public education system, whereas welfare maximization calls for the most elitist system. We show that when private education is available, the degree of elitism that maximizes social mobility i...

We investigate the relative merits of unconditional cash transfers (UCT), conditional cash transfers (CCT), and improvements in education quality on efficiency and welfare. In our setting some parents under-invest in their children's education because capital market imperfections prevent them from borrowing. When credit constrained households can be perfectly targeted by the government, we show...

We provide a sound theory for the computation of allocations of indivisible resources amongst cooperative agents, maximising the egalitarian social welfare of the overall multi-agent system, seen as a society. Agents’ preferences over resources are captured by scalar utilities that we sum up to define the agents’ individual welfare. The egalitarian social welfare is defined as the minimal indiv...

Population growth and rising consumption of meat, dairy, eggs and fish are forcing the world to face the intersecting challenges of how to sustainably feed a population expected to exceed 9 billion by 2050, while also controlling the impact of food production on the planet, on people and on animals. This review acknowledges the absence of a globally accepted definition of animal welfare and the...