In the presence of substantial relative-income effects and environmental disruption effects, economic growth may be welfare-reducing even if each and all individuals are optimizing and eagerly trying to make more money and the government also maximizes the welfare of individuals by the choice of...

In the popularly used ranking method of peer rating, the exclusion of the evaluations/marks given to oneselves is intuitively appealing and has been actually practiced, since a person/university/country typically is biased in favor of itself. This short paper shows that this apparently...

Welfare economics is incomplete as it analyzes preference without going on to analyze welfare (or happiness) which is the ultimate objective. Preference and welfare may differ due to imperfect knowledge, imperfect rationality, and/or a concern for the welfare of others (non-affective altruism)....

The Hicks-Ikema theorem, that a uniform expansion of a trading country's production set must benefit its trading partner if the preferences of the expanding country are homothetic, has been demonstrated under assumptions of the Lerner-Samuelson kind. It is shown here that the theorem remains...

While the role of division of labour is very important, in itself its scope for promoting economic growth is limited. This scope is tremendously expanded when division of labour is compounded with that of capital accumulation and technical progress and the interaction/reinforcing effects between...

The Smith dilemma refers to the inconsistency ("strictly an error") between the Smith theory on the efficiency of the market based on the absence of increasing returns and the Smith theorem on the facilitation of the economies of specialization (which gives rise to increasing returns) by the...

A theoretical framework based on economics is provided for assessing tourism's costs and benefits. Suppose that resources utilized by tourists are owned by residents and, as marketed goods or services, are priced efficiently. Then increased tourism promotes net average (i.e., Pareto) economic...

Piketty’s influential book Capital in the Twenty-First Century and its prominent review by Milanovic in the Journal of Economic Literature both assert the inevitability of an increasing share of capital in total income, given a higher rate of return to capital than the rate of growth in...