IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/taf/revpoe/v19y2007i2p139-164.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

The Meaning of Social Efficiency

Author

Listed:
  • Louis Lefeber
  • Thomas Vietorisz

Abstract

Policy implementation calls for efficiency. But because policy concerns range over broad social and political-economic areas, the efficient pursuit of one particular goal may conflict with the realization of some other, equally important social interest. Hence, efficiency for its own sake cannot be a policy goal. Giving special attention to the development process, the paper discusses the problems and contradictions that arise when policymakers working in a framework of neoclassical economic theory attempt to deal with issues of equity, stabilization, markets and trade. Starting with the limitations of market efficiency when conventional requirements of social welfare as well as social and environmental sustainability are taken into account, it is argued that a more meaningful concept of social efficiency can be obtained with the help of the human development indicators elaborated by the United Nations Development Program, augmented by the sustainability indicators developed by the European Union and others during the last decade.

Suggested Citation

  • Louis Lefeber & Thomas Vietorisz, 2007. "The Meaning of Social Efficiency," Review of Political Economy, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 19(2), pages 139-164.
    • Handle: RePEc:taf:revpoe:v:19:y:2007:i:2:p:139-164
    DOI: 10.1080/09538250701256672
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/09538250701256672
    Download Restriction: Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.
    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1080/09538250701256672?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. J. Doyne Farmer & Martin Shubik & Eric Smith, 2005. "Economics: the next physical science?," Cowles Foundation Discussion Papers 1520, Cowles Foundation for Research in Economics, Yale University.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. McDonald, David A., 2016. "To corporatize or not to corporatize (and if so, how?)," Utilities Policy, Elsevier, vol. 40(C), pages 107-114.
    2. Tadeusz A. Grzeszczyk & Jacek Pełszynski, 2020. "Towards a conceptualization of a social efficiency notion in management sciences," Ekonomia i Prawo, Uniwersytet Mikolaja Kopernika, vol. 19(1), pages 33-46, March.
    3. David A McDonald, 2016. "The weight of water: Benchmarking for public water services," Environment and Planning A, , vol. 48(11), pages 2181-2200, November.
    4. I. Haller & H. Grupp, 2009. "Demand by product characteristics: measuring solar cell quality over time," Journal of Evolutionary Economics, Springer, vol. 19(4), pages 487-506, August.
    5. Aman Luthra, 2020. "Efficiency in waste collection markets: Changing relationships between firms, informal workers, and the state in urban India," Environment and Planning A, , vol. 52(7), pages 1375-1394, October.
    6. Manuel Meireles & Cida Sanches & Samuel Ferreira & José Osvaldo De Sordi & Givaldo Santos, 2016. "Social Efficiency of For-profit Organizations in Brazil: An Empirical Analysis," Social Indicators Research: An International and Interdisciplinary Journal for Quality-of-Life Measurement, Springer, vol. 128(2), pages 909-928, September.
    7. Zhao, Linlin & Zha, Yong & Zhuang, Yuliang & Liang, Liang, 2019. "Data envelopment analysis for sustainability evaluation in China: Tackling the economic, environmental, and social dimensions," European Journal of Operational Research, Elsevier, vol. 275(3), pages 1083-1095.

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Alberto Ciacci & Takumi Sueshige & Hideki Takayasu & Kim Christensen & Misako Takayasu, 2020. "The microscopic relationships between triangular arbitrage and cross-currency correlations in a simple agent based model of foreign exchange markets," PLOS ONE, Public Library of Science, vol. 15(6), pages 1-19, June.
    2. Moura, N.J. & Ribeiro, Marcelo B., 2013. "Testing the Goodwin growth-cycle macroeconomic dynamics in Brazil," Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications, Elsevier, vol. 392(9), pages 2088-2103.
    3. Bongo Adi & Kenneth Amaeshi & Suminori Tokunaga, 2005. "Rational Choice, Scientific Method and Social Scientism," Method and Hist of Econ Thought 0509001, University Library of Munich, Germany.
    4. Sitabhra Sinha & Raj Kumar Pan, 2006. "The Power (Law) of Indian Markets: Analysing NSE and BSE trading statistics," Papers physics/0605247, arXiv.org.
    5. Klaus Mohn, 2010. "Autism in Economics? A Second Opinion," Forum for Social Economics, Springer;The Association for Social Economics, vol. 39(2), pages 191-208, July.
    6. Vogel, E.E. & Saravia, G. & Astete, J. & Díaz, J. & Riadi, F., 2015. "Information theory as a tool to improve individual pensions: The Chilean case," Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications, Elsevier, vol. 424(C), pages 372-382.
    7. J. Doyne Farmer & John Geanakoplos, 2008. "The virtues and vices of equilibrium and the future of financial economics," Papers 0803.2996, arXiv.org.
    8. Chami Figueira, F. & Moura, N.J. & Ribeiro, M.B., 2011. "The Gompertz–Pareto income distribution," Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications, Elsevier, vol. 390(4), pages 689-698.
    9. Amavilah, Voxi Heinrich, 2012. "The Caldwellian Methodological Pluralism: Wishful Thoughts and Personal Tendencies," MPRA Paper 44656, University Library of Munich, Germany, revised 28 Feb 2013.
    10. Stanislav S Borysov & Alexander V Balatsky, 2014. "Cross-Correlation Asymmetries and Causal Relationships between Stock and Market Risk," PLOS ONE, Public Library of Science, vol. 9(8), pages 1-11, August.
    11. Bell, William Paul, 2009. "Adaptive interactive expectations: dynamically modelling profit expectations," MPRA Paper 38260, University Library of Munich, Germany, revised 09 Feb 2010.
    12. Pichl, Lukáš & Kaizoji, Taisei & Yamano, Takuya, 2007. "Stylized facts in internal rates of return on stock index and its derivative transactions," Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications, Elsevier, vol. 382(1), pages 219-227.
    13. Gajic, Nenad & Budinski-Petkovic, Ljuba, 2013. "Ups and downs of economics and econophysics — Facebook forecast," Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications, Elsevier, vol. 392(1), pages 208-214.
    14. Sitabhra Sinha & Uday Kovur, 2013. "Uncovering the network structure of the world currency market: Cross-correlations in the fluctuations of daily exchange rates," Papers 1305.0239, arXiv.org.
    15. Victor M. Yakovenko, 2012. "Applications of statistical mechanics to economics: Entropic origin of the probability distributions of money, income, and energy consumption," Papers 1204.6483, arXiv.org.
    16. Winther, K. Tobias, 2008. "Analyzing new profit opportunities: a guide to making business projects financially successful," MPRA Paper 11346, University Library of Munich, Germany.

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:taf:revpoe:v:19:y:2007:i:2:p:139-164. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Chris Longhurst (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.tandfonline.com/CRPE20 .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.