Criterios de desarrollo económico óptimo

Abstract

Intertemporal comparisons of satisfaction are comparisons of a political of ethical nature. However, the problem of optimal development of a country is too complicated in order to select a criterion before knowing the results of its application. The task of the economist, then, consists in presenting to whoever has to choose, various development programs which correspond to different authors are continued, using a social welfare function with a rate of time preferences that depends on the levels of consumption. This innovation enables us to conclude that the behavior of an efficient economy is, given an initial endowment of resources, very similar to the one obtained from preferences with a constant rate of time preference: instead, if countries with similar technology and tastes but with dissimilar initial endowment of resources are compared, the surprising conclusion is reached that both can desire very different development programs. In some cases, the rich countries will become richer, and the poor countries poorer, not because of technological limitations, but because the limitations initially imposed by resources encourage some of them, but not others, to undertake the sacrifice that development means.