Consumer welfare beyond GDP
(2025) , 21 pages
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- Authors
Germain, Antoine 
- Abstract
- Inageneralconsumptionspacewhereagentsmaydifferintheirpreferences,endowments and prices, this paper builds a theory of consumer welfare on axioms reflecting the ethics of equality of opportunity: unequal budgets create welfare-relevant inequalities but heterogeneous preferences do not. When combined with an appropriate cross-economy robustness condition, these axioms single out a consumer welfare measure. Like aggregate consumption in national accounts, this measure sums up individual expenditure functions. Unlike national accounts, these functions are evaluated at a common price vector for all individuals. I show that standard measures of cost of living, standards of living, and purchasing power parity can be modified to reflect welfare as equality of opportunity without additional data.
- Affiliations
Citations
Germain, A. (2025). Consumer welfare beyond GDP (LIDAM Discussion Paper CORE 2025/11). https://hdl.handle.net/2078.5/245511