Equality of opportunity and optimal cash and in-kind policies

• 成果类型: Article
• 署名作者: Gasparini, LC; Pinto, SA
• 署名单位: West Virginia University; National University of La Plata
• 刊物名称: JOURNAL OF PUBLIC ECONOMICS
• ISSN/ISSBN: 0047-2727
• DOI: 10.1016/j.jpubeco.2005.03.001
• 发表日期: 2006
• 页码: 143-169
• 关键词: Equality of opportunity; redistribution; education; in-kind

摘要

This paper examines the argument for public provision of certain private goods, like education and health, based oil equality of opportunity by studying the utility possibility frontier of a society in which there is a concerti for the distribution of these goods. A given quality of education or health services call be consumed for free in the public sector, but people can opt-out and purchase their desired quality levels in the private sector. Some of the conclusions are: (i) a pure cash transfer is optimal when the utility redistribution is either sufficiently small or large; (ii) if and only if both the equality-of-opportunity concern and the utility redistribution are large enough, can an in-kind program which attracts the whole population be justified; (iii) even when everybody chooses the in-kind program, it may be optimal to perform some additional utility redistribution by increasing the size of such program. (c) 2005 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.