BOOKS BY ALBERTO PENCH

Il volume illustra, in una prospettiva interdisciplinare, l’articolazione della prima “Scuola di Scienze corporative” creata in Italia. Fondata a Pisa nel 1928 – su iniziativa di Giuseppe Bottai, Giovanni Gentile e Armando Carlini – e finalizzata alla formazione di una classe dirigente che avrebbe dovuto operare nelle istituzioni politiche, economiche e corporative dell’Italia fascista, fin dalle origini rivolse particolare attenzione alle discipline di carattere economico teorico e applicato e di carattere giuridico.

This paper is focused on kind transfers targeted at old people in need of long term care: it is assumed that they live with their children who provide them health care: the amount of health care is determined by free public provision, by additional professional care bought in the market or by informal care directly given by the children in terms of leisure. Then it deals with the implementation of a policy consisting of an increase in free professional care compensated by an equal reduction in pensions: the particular financing scheme can be motivated by a sort of intra generational solidarity. The proposed policy has the additional goal to promote a substitution of professional care for informal care in order to increase overall labour supply. Conditions assuring a positive change in public budget and in social welfare are derived: they depend by the mutual interaction of a number of economic, medical and demographic parameters: among others, household net wage rate, the ratio between income and indirect tax rates and the structure of older population.

This paper demonstrates a case where theoretical measures of willingness to pay to secure a beneficial change in environmental quality (or in the available quantity of a public good) or to avoid an exactly opposite change are incorrect measure of maximum willingness to pay. The key requirement is that indifference curves are allowed to intersect the axis corresponding to environmental quality (or the public good with zero price) and the source of this theoretical flaw is that in spite of a zero marginal willingness to pay marginal utility for environmental quality (or for the public good) is strictly positive. In such cases the paper suggests that only correct measures are the corresponding willingness to accept for the opposite change.

Excess Burden: An Ill Defined Concept? ABSTRACT: The number and differences among alternative definitions of excess burden proposed in the literature, from seminal contributions by Marshall and Barone to the latest survey in the Handbook of Public Economics, stimulated the present paper where some of them are critically reviewed together with their ambiguities. Since its birth two notions of excess burden are available: an absolute notion (the excess burden of a single tax) and a relative one (the excess burden of a tax versus another): though distinct their differences blurred during years. The central thesis of this paper is that for excess burden to be a fruitful tool of analysis it should be interpreted as an intrinsically relative concept and the only way to avoid ambiguities in its interpretation is to define it in terms of either larger welfare loss of two equal yield taxes or tax structures or smaller revenue at a common final utility level.