Beyond Averages: Inequality‐Sensitive Welfare Comparisons Across the Atlantic
提出一个基于偏好的社会福利指标，能同时反映国内寿命和收入的不平等，并用它比较欧盟和美国的福利水平与趋势，发现结果对不平等厌恶程度等规范假设高度敏感。
ABSTRACT Prior studies assessing welfare across countries have utilized measures that combine country‐level outcomes in income and life expectancy. However, this perspective remains blind to the fact that two countries may have the same life expectancy and/or average income but very different underlying distributions. In this paper, I introduce a new preference‐based measure of social welfare that is sensitive to within‐country disparities in lifespan and income. To illustrate the measure, I compare welfare levels and trends for the EU and US using different sets of preference parameters. The results reveal that welfare levels and trends are highly sensitive to several normative assumptions, particularly the degree of inequality aversion. Moreover, I find a close connection between the degree of inequality aversion and the assumed level of rank‐order correlation between income and lifespan. Overall, the results highlight the need for measures of welfare that are explicit about different value judgments.