IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/fth/harver/1859.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Making Dynamic Welfare Comparisons

Author

Listed:
  • Martin L. Weitzman

Abstract

For guidance in determining which items should be included in comprehensive NDP and how they should be included, reference is often made to the linearized Hamiltonian from an optimal growth problem. The paper gives a rigorous interpretation of this procedure in terms of a money-metric utility function linked to familiar elements of standard welfare theory. A key insight is that the Hamiltonian itself is a quasilinear utility function, so imposing the money-metric normalization is simply equivalent to using Marshallian consumer surplus as the appropriate measure of welfare when there are no income effects. The twin concepts of the "sustainability-equivalence principle" and the "dynamic welfare-comparison principle" are explained, and it is indicated why these two principles are important for the theory of national income accounting.

Suggested Citation

  • Martin L. Weitzman, 1999. "Making Dynamic Welfare Comparisons," Harvard Institute of Economic Research Working Papers 1859, Harvard - Institute of Economic Research.
    • Handle: RePEc:fth:harver:1859
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    To our knowledge, this item is not available for download. To find whether it is available, there are three options:
    1. Check below whether another version of this item is available online.
    2. Check on the provider's web page whether it is in fact available.
    3. Perform a search for a similarly titled item that would be available.

    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:fth:harver:1859. 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.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using 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: Thomas Krichel (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/ieharus.html .

    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.