Minority-Language Rights: Rational Policy Based on Welfare Economics

This chapter analyzes language policy from the point of view of (economic) policy analysis in the spirit of cost-benefit analysis. Policy measures are characterized by attributed values and implementation costs. Language-related goods display various degrees of rivalry and spatiality; issuing decrees in a minority language is both non-rival and non-spatial, whereas the provision of home nursing in a given language is to a high degree both rival and spatial. This determines the structure of the costs of a policy measure which is as important for the analysis as the magnitude of costs. Equating costs and attributed value of a planning measure, we can for each measure define an “efficiency frontier” depending on the numeric size and habitation patterns of the beneficiaries of the politic in a given jurisdiction. That way the efficiency of different measures in different jurisdictions can be characterized. Several measures are joined into policy categories with the same implementation rules, whose efficiency properties are analyzed. The analysis is extended to issues of distribution and justice and, finally, also the (optimal) size of jurisdictions for different policy categories can be determined. This is illustrated and exemplified with data from southern Slovakia.