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M.A. Previous Economics M.A. PREVIOUS ECONOMICS PAPER IV (A) ECONOMICS OF SOCIAL SECTOR AND ENVIRONMENT WRITTEN BY SEHBA HUSSAIN EDITED BY PROF.SHAKOOR KHAN M.A. PREVIOUS ECONOMICS PAPER IV (A) ECONOMICS OF SOCIAL SECTOR AND ENVIRONMENT BLOCK 1 WELFARE ECONOMICS, SOCIAL SECTORS AND MEASUREMENT OF ENVIRONMENTAL VALUES 2 PAPER IV (A) ECONOMICS OF SOCIAL SECTOR AND ENVIRONMENT BLOCK 1 WELFARE ECONOMICS, SOCIAL SECTORS AND MEASUREMENT OF ENVIRONMENTAL VALUES CONTENTS Page number Unit 1 Elements of Economics of social sector and environment 4 Unit 2 Measurement of Environmental values 33 Unit 3 Environmental Policy and Regulations 47 3 BLOCK 1 WELFARE ECONOMICS, SOCIAL SECTORS AND MEASUREMENT OF ENVIRONMENTAL VALUES In block 1 we will familiarize you with some elementary concepts of welfare economics and social sector. The block also deals with measurement of environmental values using appropriate measures that are being used across the globe. This block has three units. Unit 1 presents the elements of economics of social sector and environment. First we discussed Pareto optimality and competitive equilibrium followed by Fundamental theorems of welfare economics. Other areas of discussion were Externalities and market inefficiency; Externalities and missing markets; the property rights and Externalities; Non convexities and Externality. Pareto optimal provision for public goods will be discussed in later sections. Unit 2 deals with measurement of environmental values. It throws light the theory of environmental valuation including the total economic value. Unit also discusses different values like direct and indirect values that have the great relevance in economics of environment further the unit reveal various Environment valuation techniques to help readers have the clear understanding of these techniques. Unit 3 spells out the Environmental policy and regulations. It discusses in depth, the environmental policy instruments and Government monitoring and enforcement of environmental regulations in different nations. International trade and environment in WTO regime have been discussed at last in the unit. 4 UNIT 1 ELEMENTS OF ECONOMICS OF SOCIAL SECTOR AND ENVIRONMENT Objectives After studying this unit, you should be able to understand and appreciate: The concepts of Pareto optimality and competitive equilibrium Relevance of fundamental theorems of welfare economics Te approach to externalities in context of market inefficiency, missing markets, property rights and non convexities Pareto optimal provisions for public goods Structure 1.1 Introduction 1.2 Pareto optimality and competitive equilibrium 1.3 Fundamental theorems of welfare economics 1.4 Externalities and market inefficiency 1.5 Externalities and missing markets 1.6 The property rights and Externalities 1.7 Non convexities and Externality 1.8 Pareto optimal provision for public goods 1.9 Summary 1.10 Further readings 1.1 INTRODUCTION Social welfare refers to the overall welfare of society. With sufficiently strong assumptions, it can be specified as the summation of the welfare of all the individuals in the society. Welfare may be measured either cardinally in terms of "utils" or dollars, or measured ordinally in terms of Pareto efficiency. The cardinal method in "utils" is seldom used in pure theory today because of aggregation problems that make the meaning of the method doubtful, except on widely challenged underlying assumptions. In applied welfare economics, such as in cost-benefit analysis, money-value estimates are often used, particularly where income-distribution effects are factored into the analysis or seem unlikely to undercut the analysis. On the other hand, welfare economics is a branch of economics that uses microeconomic techniques to simultaneously determine allocative efficiency within an economy and the income distribution associated with it. It analyzes social welfare, however measured, in terms of economic activities of the individuals that comprise the theoretical society 5 considered. As such, individuals, with associated economic activities, are the basic units for aggregating to social welfare, whether of a group, a community, or a society, and there is no "social welfare" apart from the "welfare" associated with its individual units. Some main elements of welfare economics with reference to social sector and environment will be discussed in this unit. 1.2 PARETO OPTIMALITY AND COMPETETIVE EQILIBRIUM Pareto efficiency, or Pareto optimality, is an important concept in economics with broad applications in game theory, engineering and the social sciences. The term is named after Vilfredo Pareto, an Italian economist who used the concept in his studies of economic efficiency and income distribution. Informally, Pareto efficient situations are those in which any change to make any person better off is impossible without making someone else worse off. Given a set of alternative allocations of, say, goods or income for a set of individuals, a change from one allocation to another that can make at least one individual better off without making any other individual worse off is called a Pareto improvement. An allocation is defined as Pareto efficient or Pareto optimal when no further Pareto improvements can be made. Such an allocation is often called a strong Pareto optimum (SPO) by way of setting it apart from mere "weak Pareto optima" as defined below. Formally, a (strong/weak) Pareto optimum is a maximal element for the partial order relation of Pareto improvement/strict Pareto improvement: it is an allocation such that no other allocation is "better" in the sense of the order relation. Pareto efficiency does not necessarily result in a socially desirable distribution of resources, as it makes no statement about equality or the overall well-being of a society. 1.2.1 PARETO EFFICIENCY IN ECONOMICS An economic system that is Pareto inefficient implies that a certain change in allocation of goods (for example) may result in some individuals being made "better off" with no individual being made worse off, and therefore can be made more Pareto efficient through a Pareto improvement. Here 'better off' is often interpreted as "put in a preferred position." It is commonly accepted that outcomes that are not Pareto efficient are to be avoided, and therefore Pareto efficiency is an important criterion for evaluating economic systems and public policies. If economic allocation in any system (in the real world or in a model) is not Pareto efficient, there is theoretical potential for a Pareto improvement — an increase in Pareto efficiency: through reallocation, improvements to at least one participant's well-being can be made without reducing any other participant's well-being. In the real world ensuring that nobody is disadvantaged by a change aimed at improving economic efficiency may require compensation of one or more parties. For instance, if a change in economic policy dictates that a legally protected monopoly ceases to exist and 6 that market subsequently becomes competitive and more efficient, the monopolist will be made worse off. However, the loss to the monopolist will be more than offset by the gain in efficiency. This means the monopolist can be compensated for its loss while still leaving an efficiency gain to be realized by others in the economy. Thus, the requirement of nobody being made worse off for a gain to others is met. In real-world practice, the compensation principle often appealed to is hypothetical. That is, for the alleged Pareto improvement (say from public regulation of the monopolist or removal of tariffs) some losers are not (fully) compensated. The change thus results in distribution effects in addition to any Pareto improvement that might have taken place. The theory of hypothetical compensation is part of Kaldor-Hicks efficiency, also called Potential Pareto Criterion. (Ng, 1983). Under certain idealized conditions, it can be shown that a system of free markets will lead to a Pareto efficient outcome. This is called the first welfare theorem. It was first demonstrated mathematically by economists Kenneth Arrow and Gerard Debreu. However, the result does not rigorously establish welfare results for real economies because of the restrictive assumptions necessary for the proof (markets exist for all possible goods, all markets are in full equilibrium, markets are perfectly competitive, transaction costs are negligible, there must be no externalities, and market participants must have perfect information). Moreover, it has since been demonstrated mathematically that, in the absence of perfect information or complete markets, outcomes will generically be Pareto inefficient (the Greenwald-Stiglitz Theorem). Pareto frontier Given a set of choices and a way of valuing them, the Pareto frontier or Pareto set is the set of choices that are Pareto efficient. The Pareto frontier is particularly useful in engineering: by restricting attention to the set of choices that are Pareto-efficient, a designer can make tradeoffs within this set, rather than considering the full range of every parameter. The Pareto frontier is defined formally as follows. Consider a design space with n real parameters, and for each design-space point there are m different criteria by which to judge that point. Let be the function which assigns, to each design-space point x, a criteria-space point f(x). This represents the way of valuing the designs. Now, it may be that some designs are infeasible; so let X be a set of feasible designs in , which must be a compact set. Then the set which represents the feasible criterion points is f(X), the image of the set X under the action of f. Call this image Y. Now construct the Pareto frontier as a subset of Y, the feasible criterion points. It can be assumed that the preferable values of each criterion parameter are the lesser ones, thus minimizing each dimension of the criterion vector. Then compare criterion vectors as follows: One criterion vector y strictly dominates (or "is preferred to") a vector y* if each parameter of y is no greater than the corresponding parameter of y* and at least one parameter is strictly less: that is, for each i and for some i.
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