The World Health Organization estimates that 300 million clinical cases of malaria occur annually and also observed that during the 80's and part of the 90's its incidence increased noticably. There are basically two factors behind the incidence of malaria: 'geographical destiny' and...

We use analytical and numerical models to explain and quantify the welfare effects of subsidies for artemisinin combination treatments (ACTs), a valuable new class of antimalarial drugs. There are two (second-best) efficiency rationales for such subsidies: by expanding drug use, they reduce...

We study the economic relationship between globalization and inequality within a country. In a partial equilibrium it is shown even when the local government exclusively maximizes the welfare of the marginalized (unemployed) people, relative consumption inequality between employed and the...

Will the fast expansion of cash-based programming in developing countries increase international migration? Theoretically, cash transfers may favor international migration by relaxing liquidity, credit, and risk constraints. But transfers, especially those conditional upon staying at home, may...

The number of hypothesis trying to explain which are the reasons behind the decision to migrate to work into a developed country are diverse and at the same time, difficult to test due to the multiplicity of factors which affect it. This papers attempts to move forward trying to disentangle...

This paper analyses the role of social safety nets in the form of redistributional transfers and wage subsidies. It is argued that public welfare programs can be viewed as a crime-preventing or disruption-preventing devices because they tend to increase the opportunity cost of engaging in crime...

Research background: Applied welfare economics offers various social welfare functions (SWF) for appraising income distributions. Social planners commonly use two SWFs: SWFε implied by income inequality aversion (ε) and SWFv implied by rank inequality aversion (v). However, a voluntary choice...

This paper demonstrates the prevalence, pervasiveness, persistence, and resilience of a system of non-Big God religious beliefs, in absence of religious organizations and moralizing prescriptions, thanks to a self-fulfilling mechanism based on social insurance. We focus on the Vietnamese’s...

This chapter examines the role of altruistic motives in the economic analysis of public social transfers, both from a positive and from a normative point of view. The positive question is to know whether we can fully neglect altruistic considerations to explain the development or sustainability...

This paper reexamines the design of the optimal lockdown strategy by paying attention to its robustness to the postulated social welfare criterion. We first characterize optimal lockdown under utilitarianism, and we show that this social criterion can, under some conditions, imply a COVID-19...