Y. Ng - Böcker

Happiness is a private matter and individual pursuit; however, public policy does have an important role and can contribute much through various enabling means. This volume discusses the determinants of happiness and presents case studies of how public policy can help promote happiness.

Recognizing increasing returns disrupts much of the established wisdom in economic analysis, making money non-neutral, equity conflict with freedom, and encouraging goods with increasing returns efficient. This book discusses these problems and ways they can be handled, helping to explain phenomena in the real world.

Yew-Kwan Ng provides arguments for the exclusive concern with efficiency ("a dollar is a dollar") in all specific areas of public economic policy, leaving the objective of equality to be achieved through the general tax/transfer system. Public policies should ultimately maximize the sum of individual welfares which should be individual happiness rather than preferences. Relative income and environmental disruption effects cause a bias in favour of private spending which is no longer conducive to happiness socially. Welfare can be increase more by higher public spending on research and environmental protection, including the perfection of the techniques of brain stimulation to increase happiness.

Yew Kwang Ng looks to make welfare economics more complete by discussing the recent inframarginal analysis of division of labour and by pushing welfare economics from the level of preference to that of happiness, making a reformulation of the foundation of public policy necessary. A theory of the third best is provided, with extension to the equality/efficiency issue. The remarkable conclusion of treating a dollar as a dollar provides a powerful simplification of public policy formulation in general and in cost benefit analysis in particular.

This volume is a collection of selected papers using the framework of inframarginal analysis of the division of labour held at Monash University on 6-7 July 2001. This framework, pioneered mainly by Professor Xiaokai Yang (with joint researches involving all the three editors and many of the authors) has been recommended by Professor James Buchanan (Nobel Laureate in Economics) as the most important analysis in economics in the world today.

Yew-Kwang Ng looks to make welfare economics more complete by discussing the recent inframarginal analysis of division of labour and by pushing welfare economics from the level of preference to that of happiness, making a reformulation of the foundation of public policy necessary.