Departing from the welfarist tradition, recent theories of justice focus on individual opportunities as the appropriate standard for distributive judgments. Justice is seen as requiring equality of opportunity, instead of outcomes, among the individuals. To explore how this philosophical conception can be translated into concrete public policy, we select the in-come as relevant outcome and the income tax as the relevant redistributive policy, and we address the following questions: (i) what is the degree of opportunity inequality in an income distribution? (ii) how to design an opportunity egalitarian income tax policy? Both positive and normative criteria for ranking income distributions on the basis of equality of oppor-tunities are derived. Moreover, we characterize an opportunity egalitarian income tax policy and we formulate criteria for choosing among alternative tax systems.
Download Info
To download:
If you experience problems downloading a file, check if you have the
proper application to
view it first. Information about this may be contained
in the File-Format links below. In case of further problems read
the IDEAS help
page. Note that these files are not on the IDEAS
site. Please be patient as the files may be large.
Publisher Info
Paper provided by Department of Economics, University of York in its series Discussion Papers with number
98/11.
Length: Date of creation: Date of revision: Handle: RePEc:yor:yorken:98/11
Contact details of provider: Postal: Department of Economics and Related Studies, University of York, York, YO10 5DD, United Kingdom Phone: (0)1904 433776 Fax: (0)1904 433759 Email: Web page: http://www.york.ac.uk/depts/econ/ More information through EDIRC
For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its listing, contact: (Michael Shallcross).
References listed on IDEAS Please report citation or reference errors to , or , if you are the registered author of the cited work, log in to your RePEc Author Service profile, click on "citations" and make appropriate adjustments.:
W. Bossert & M. Fleurbaey & D. Van de gaer, 1996.
"On second-best compensation,"
THEMA Working Papers
96-07, THEMA (THéorie Economique, Modélisation et Applications), Université de Cergy-Pontoise.
Other versions:
Bossert, W. & Fleurbaey, M. & Van de gaer, D., 1996.
"On Second-Best Compensation,"
Papers
9607, Paris X - Nanterre, U.F.R. de Sc. Ec. Gest. Maths Infor..
Cited by: (explanations, Please report citation or reference errors to , or , if you are the registered author of the cited work, log in to your RePEc Author Service profile, click on "citations" and make appropriate adjustments.)