This is the first book on welfare economics to be primarily intended for undergraduates. It explores such concepts as Pareto optimality in a market economy, the compensation criterion, and the social welfare function, and analyzes market failures using different ways of measuring welfare changes. The book covers public choice, and the issues of efficient provision of public goods, government failures, and efficient and optimal taxation, concluding with an examination of applied welfare economics, methods for revealing people's preferences, cost-benefit analysis, and project evaluation in a...

This book is an advanced text in applied welfare economics and its application to environmental economics. The author goes far beyond the existing literature, deriving sets of rules that can be used to assess the social benefits and costs of private and public sector projects that affect the environment. Drawing on a number of empirical illustrations, this book will be of interest not only to those taking advanced courses in environmental economics, welfare economics, and public economics, but also as a reference for those undertaking project evaluations in government and business.

A major problem in health economics is how to give a value to changes in health. This is the first book to present a comprehensive survey of the money measures that are used in such evaluations. The author defines the properties of these money measures, examining them in both a certain and a risky world. He evaluates available empirical approaches for the assessment of the value of health changes, and considers measures such as quality-adjusted life years (QALYS) and health-years equivalents (HYES).