Social Welfare Evaluation Research Articles

Social welfare evaluation during demand response programs execution considering machine learning-based load profile clustering

In the last decade, with the introduction of smart meters to smart grids, demand response programs (DRPs) have been widely adopted to establish a generation and consumption balance. DRPs provide many benefits for efficient grid management. However, these programs are conducive to higher levels of dissatisfaction by changing grid customers' consumption patterns. This paper aims to investigate the effects of DRPs on social welfare (SW). To this end, the paper presents a mathematical model for SW during the implementation of DRPs. In the proposed model, the level of customer satisfaction is assumed the main factor contributing to SW. This mathematical model considers different types of DRPs in terms of their impacts on SW. The paper also seeks to obtain linear and nonlinear models of DRPs and the coefficient of participation (CoP). CoP as an indicator shows the percentage of customers who actively participate in each DRP and plays a significant role in the assessment of the SW level. Moreover, owing to the sparsity and variety of distribution network customers, load patterns are classified into different clusters to take the load types into account. As a matter of fact, this process aims to identify similar patterns and thus, the same level of satisfaction for each separate cluster. The classification process is performed by using a machine learning-based clustering method known as the Affinity Propagation (AP) algorithm. Then, the model calculates the level of SW for the clusters based on the usage of electrical equipment and the time of day when they are turned on. The obtained levels of SW help operators select the best programs for every cluster in terms of customer satisfaction, and achieve the highest performance of DRPs. Lastly, the model is evaluated using real data of a distribution network to ensure the effectiveness and accuracy of the model.

One Hundred Years of Social Sciences in Sri Lankan Universities

No abstract available

Analysis of Perspectives on Social Welfare Evaluation of Power Sector Reforms in India

Analysis of Perspectives on Social Welfare Evaluation of Power Sector Reforms in India

Identity: the demand for dignity and the politics of resentment

No abstract available

Natural resources: A curse on welfare?

Nowadays, the evaluation and monitoring of social welfare in all countries, particularly in developing countries, has become one of the most important and inevitable problems for governments. Since most developing countries have abundant natural resources, despite the common perception, these resources not only have not increased social welfare in these countries, but they also resulted in an unusual decrease in the social welfare. In this study, we intend to use panel quantile regression to investigate the impact of the dependence on natural resources and Institutional quality index on social welfare in fuel exporting developing countries during the period 2007–2020. The results showed that the effect of the dependence on natural resources on welfare is negative and significant. Also, it indicates that the phenomenon of the welfare curse is prevalent in fuel exporting developing countries. In addition, the effect of Institutional quality index on the welfare of fuel exporting developing countries is positive and significant. According to the results, the effect of other control variables like human development index, uemployment, public service index, and general government final consumption expenditure on welfare is negative and significant. The results of our research are very useful for policymakers. According to the results, we suggest that policymakers enact laws to prevent corruption. Also, take steps in the direction of transferring from the export of natural resources to the export of industrial products.

Carney M.: Value(s): Building a Better World for All

No abstract available

A new puzzle in the social evaluation of risk

AbstractWe highlight a new paradox for the social evaluation of risk that bears on the evaluation of individual well-being rather than social welfare, but has serious implications for social evaluation. The paradox consists in a tension between rationality, respect for individual preferences, and a principle of informational parsimony that excludes individual risk attitudes from the assessment of riskless situations. No evaluation criterion can satisfy these three principles. This impossibility result has implications for the evaluation of social welfare under risk, especially when the preferences of some individuals are not known. It generalizes existing impossibility results, while relying on very weak principles of social rationality and respect for individual preferences. We explore the possibilities opened by weakening each of our three principles and discuss the advantages and drawbacks of these different routes.

Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo: Good Economics for Hard Times

No abstract available

Time Consistent Fair Social Choice

In this paper, we study intertemporal social welfare evaluations when agents may have heterogeneous time preferences. We first show that, even if all agents share the time preference, there exists a conflict between efficiency in the sense of Pareto principle, time consistency, and equity requiring to reduce inequalities regardless of the past. We argue that this impossibility result is due to a tension between equity and time consistency concerning how the past should be taken into account when evaluating intertemporal distributions. To avoid the conflict, we introduce another equity axiom taking the past into account and thus compatible with time consistency. Using this equity and time consistency, we characterize a maximin social welfare ordering that takes the past information into account.

World Bank: The Economy in the Time of Covid 19: Semiannual Report of the Latin America and Caribbean Region

No abstract available

WELFARE AS EQUITY EQUIVALENTS

AbstractEquity (or, its counterpart, inequity) plays a fundamental role in the evaluation of social welfare in different dimensions. In this paper, we revisit the concept of inequity – in the sense of unequal distributions – across individuals, time, and states of the world using a unified framework that generalizes the standard expected discounted utilitarianism approach. We propose a general measure of welfare as equity equivalents and a corresponding inequity index. We show that allowing for different attitudes toward inequity across different dimensions covers a scope of possible inequity preferences with different interpretations. We then prove that the order of aggregation across the different dimensions matters for welfare evaluations. Finally, we show that many of the welfare‐theoretical approaches recently developed in the literature can be interpreted as special cases of this general framework.

Should a pension reform be announced? A reply

Fedotenkov (2016) shows that a reduction in the pay-as-you-go (PAYG) contribution rate leads to larger welfare losses for the first transitional generation if the reform is announced in advance. His analysis is based on expected lifetime utility at the reform announcement date. This note reconsiders the reform from the alternative perspective of implementation date. It argues that an announced reform may be preferable because it raises realized consumption of the first transitional generation in old age. Implications for social welfare evaluations are illustrated with a numerical example.

Equity and Time Consistency for Intertemporal Social Decisions

In this paper, we study intertemporal social welfare evaluations when agents’ discount factors may be different. We first show that there exists a conflict between efficiency, equity, and time consistency, even if all agents share the same discount factor. We argue that this impossibility result is due to a tension between equity and time consistency regarding how the past should be taken into account when evaluating intertemporal distributions. Then, we instead introduce weaker requirements of time consistency and equity. On the one hand, using the weaker version of time consistency, we characterize a maximin social welfare ordering which completely ignores the past information. On the other hand, using the weaker form of equity, we characterize another maximin social welfare ordering which completely respects the past information.

The Impact of a Voter’s Retrospective Evaluation of Social Welfare on Vote Choices in the 20th Korean Legislative Election : Individual Ideology, Income, and Age

사회복지가 중요한 선거이슈이자 정부평가의 한 기준으로 주목받고 있음에도 불구하고 사회복지는 회고투표의 대상으로 관심을 받지 못하여 왔다. 이러한 문제의식에서 본 연구는 유권자들의 사회복지에 대한 회고적 평가가 국회의원 선거에서 정부여당과 정부여당 소속 후보들에 대한 투표선택에 어떠한 영향을 미쳤는지를 살펴본다. 특히 유권자의 이념성향, 소득수준, 연령이 이러한 복지회고 평가에 미치는 영향을 조사한다. 제20대 국회의원 총선거 유권자의식 조사 데이터를 분석한 결과, 유권자의 사회복지에 대한 회고적 평가는 정당명부투표선택에서 정부여당에 대한 투표선택에 유의미한 영향을 미치는 것으로 나타났다. 또한 이러한 사회복지 회고평가에 기초한 투표선택은 유권자의 이념성향이 진보적일수록, 연령이 높을수록 더 강하게 나타났다. 반면에 소득수준의 경우에는 특별한 영향을 미치지 않았다. 한편 지역구 투표선택에서는 유권자의 회고적 평가가 투표선택에 유의미한 영향을 미치지 않았다. 본 연구의 결과는 한국 선거에서 사회복지에 대한 유권자의 평가가 정부에 대한 회고투표의 대상으로 등장하고 있다는 것을 보여준다.

Decentralization and development of Sri Lanka within a Unitary State

No abstract available

Issues in food security and domestic food production in Sri Lanka

No abstract available

Industrial development and social welfare: A case study of Iran

Nowadays, monitoring and evaluation of social welfare are of profound import in many countries. This study sought to shed some light on the impact of industrial development on the Iranian social welfare. The Iranian Social Welfare Composite Index (SWCI) and Sen Welfare index (SEN) considered as proxies of Iranian social welfare. To gauge the impact of industrialization on social welfare, Autoregressive Distributed Lags (ARDL) bound testing was utilized. The econometric models estimated using annual data from 1967 to 2015 and presented in terms of long-run and short-run dynamic relationships. The results indicate that industrial development had a significant impact on the Iranian social welfare and this impact has been stronger in the long run. In addition, oil revenues, inflation, unemployment and the Iraq-Iran War have had a significant impact on the Iranian social welfare during the period under review. Despite the contradictory impact of industrialization on the various dimensions of welfare, the results show that the industrial development has had a positive impact on the social welfare in Iran. So, the government can boost the effects of industrialization on social welfare by controlling its negative effects.

Neoliberalism versus Sovereignty: The Case of Sri Lanka

No Abstract available.

Information theoretic approaches to income density estimation with an application to the U.S. income data

The size distribution of income is the basis of income inequality measures which in turn are needed for evaluation of social welfare. Therefore, proper specification of the income density function is of special importance. In this paper, using information theoretic approach, first, we provide a maximum entropy (ME) characterization of some well-known income distributions. Then, we suggest a class of flexible parametric densities which satisfy certain economic constraints and stylized facts of personal income data such as the weak Pareto law and a decline of the income-share elasticities. Our empirical results using the U.S. family income data show that the ME principle provides economically meaningful and a very parsimonious and, at the same time, flexible specification of the income density function.

The State of Female Autonomy in India: A Stochastic Dominance Approach

The promotion of female autonomy is both intrinsically and instrumentally desirable. We document differences in the distribution of female autonomy in India (using the National Family Health Survey 2005–2006) addressing two methodological challenges: the multidimensional nature of the concept and its frequent measurement with ordinal variables (which are not amenable to direct comparisons of social averages). We tackle these challenges with three methods based on stochastic dominance techniques suited for ordinal and dichotomous variables. Whenever these dominance conditions hold for a pairwise comparison, we can conclude that the multidimensional autonomy distribution in one state is more desirable than in another one across a broad range of criteria for the individual and social welfare evaluation of autonomy. Consistently across the three methods, we find that most of the states with better autonomy distributions (in pairwise comparisons) come from the north east and the south, whereas most of the states with worse autonomy distributions come from the north.