Economics
(Chronological Order):
1.
The
necessity of cardinal utility, including an impossibility theorem in the single
or intra-profile framework of social choice:
* Kemp, M.C. and Ng, Yew-Kwang (1976), On the existence of social welfare functions, social
orderings, and social decisions functions, Economica,
February, pp. 59-66. – Shows that a reasonable social welfare or decision
function is not possible if the intensities of individual preferences are not
used, even if individual preferences are fixed; together with Parks (1976), it
opens up a whole area of ‘single-profile’ impossibility theorems.
http://www.jstor.org.ezproxy.lib.monash.edu.au/stable/pdfplus/2553016.pdf
Beyond Pareto Optimality:
The necessity of interpersonal cardinal utilities in distributional
judgements and social choice, Zeitschrift für Nationalökonomie, 1982,
42(3): 207-233.
A
case for happiness, cardinalism, and interpersonal
comparison”, Economic Journal, , November 1997, 107(445): 1848-1858.
2.
A
theory of third best:
* Towards a theory of third best, Public Finance,
1977. pp. 1-15. – Shows the usefulness of simple optimality rules despite the
theory of second best.
Non-economic activities, indirect externalities, and
third-best policies, Kyklos,
1975, 507-525.
3.
Separating
efficiency and equality considerations in specific issues:
* Quasi-Pareto social improvements, American
Economic Review, Dec. 1984, pp. 1033-1050. – Shows that it is more
efficient to treat a dollar as a dollar (pure efficiency rules supreme) in
specific issues, leaving the distributional objectives to the general
tax/transfer system.
http://www.jstor.org.ezproxy.lib.monash.edu.au/stable/pdfplus/560.pdf
4. Combining
micro, macro and general-equilibrium analysis:
Aggregate demand, business expectation, and
economic recovery without aggravating inflation, Australian Economic Papers, June 1977, 130-140.
Macroeconomics with non-perfect competition,
Economic Journal, September 1980,
598-610.
* A micro-macroeconomic analysis based on
a representative firm, Economica,
May 1982, 49: 121-139.
http://www.jstor.org.ezproxy.lib.monash.edu.au/stable/pdfplus/2553302.pdf
* Ng, Yew-Kwang (1986), Mesoeconomics: A Micro-Macro Analysis. London: Harvester, pp. xv + 267. – Combines the
traditional micro, macro, and general-equilibrium analyses into a simplified
integrated analysis allowing for non-perfect competition.
Business confidence and depression prevention: A mesoeconomic perspective, American Economic Review, May 1992, 82(2): 365-371.
Non-neutrality of money under non-perfect competition: why do
economists fail to see the possibility? In Arrow, Ng, and Yang, eds., Increasing Returns and Economic Analysis, London:
Macmillan, 1998, 232-252.
Why is a financial crisis important? The significance of the
relaxation of the assumption of perfect competition, International Journal of Business and Economics, August 2009, 8(2):
91-114.
5.
Diamond
goods and burden-free taxes:
* Diamonds are a government’s
best friend: Burden-free taxes on
goods valued for their values, American
Economic Review, March 1987, 77: 186-191.
Mixed diamond goods and anomalies
in consumer theory: Upward-sloping compensated demand curves with unchanged diamondness, Mathematical
Social Sciences, 1993, 25: 287-293.
6. *
The enrichment of a sector (individual/region/country) benefits others: The
third welfare theorem?, Pacific Economic Review, Nov. 1996, 1(2): 93-115.
7.
A
case for higher public spending:
Relative-income effects and the appropriate
level of public expenditure, Oxford
Economic Papers, June 1987, 293-300.
* Efficiency,
Equality, and the Foundation of Public Policy: With a Case for Higher Public
Spending.
London: Macmillan, 2000, pp. x + 189. – Provides a welfare economic foundation
for public policy; argues in favour of maximizing the unweighted sum of
individual welfares and in favour of increasing public spending.
The
optimal size of public spending and distortionary costs of taxation, National Tax Journal, 2000, Vol. 52(2):
253-272.
8.
Extending
welfare economics, including pushing it from the level of preference to that of
welfare, the significance of increasing returns, the paradox of universal
externality, the E-F conflict, the value of life, and two-part tariffs:
Income distribution as a peculiar public good: The paradox of redistribution and the
paradox of universal externality, Public
Finance, 1973, 1-10.
Ng, Yew-Kwang
& Mendel Weisser (1974), Optimal pricing with
budgetary constraints: The case of the two-part tariff, Review of Economic Studies, July 1974, 337-345.
http://www.jstor.org.ezproxy.lib.monash.edu.au/stable/pdfplus/2296753.pdf?acceptTC=true
The paradox of
universal externality, Journal of
Economic Theory, 1975, 258-264.
* Equity and efficiency versus freedom and
fairness: An inherent conflict, Kyklos, 1985,
495-516.
The
older the more valuable: Divergence between utility and dollar values of life
as one ages”, Journal of Economics (Zeitschrift für Nationalökonomie), 1992, 55(1): 1-16.
* From
preference to happiness: Towards a more complete welfare economics, Social Choice & Welfare, 2003, 20:
307-50. – Attempts to push welfare economic analysis to include environmental
quality, relative-income effects, imperfect knowledge and imperfect
rationality.
http://www.springerlink.com.ezproxy.lib.monash.edu.au/content/61m11jgtc3vl7lpd/fulltext.pdf
*Welfare
Economics: Towards a More Complete Analysis, London: Palgrave/Macmillan, 2004, pp. xiii+355
(ISBN 0-333-97121-3).
http://us.macmillan.com/welfareeconomics
* Increasing
Returns and Economic Efficiency, Palgrave/Macmillan, U.K., 2009 pp.
xiii+200.
http://www.palgrave.com/products/title.aspx?pid=287210
9.
A
new framework analysing the division of labour:
* Yang, Xiaokai [major
contributor] and Ng, Yew-Kwang (1993), Specialization and Economic
Organization: A New Classical
Microeconomic Framework. In
“Contributions to Economic Analysis”, Vol. 215, 1993, Amsterdam: North Holland, pp. xvi + 507. – Using
modern mathematical method to analyse the Classical economic problems of
division of labour and evolution of economic organization at the economy level.
Yew-Kwang Ng & Siang Ng (2003), Do the economies of
specialization justify the work ethics? An examination of Buchanan’s hypothesis,
Journal of Economic Behavior
and Organization, 50: 339-53.
Division of
labour and transaction costs: An introduction, Division of Labour & Transaction Costs, 2005, 1(1):1-13.
Yew-Kwang Ng & Siang Ng (2007), Why should governments encourage improvements in
infrastructure? Indirect network
externality of transaction efficiency, Public
Finance and Management, 7(4): 340-362.
Yew-Kwang Ng
& Dingsheng Zhang (2007), Average-cost pricing, increasing returns, and optimal
output: comparing home and market production, Journal of Economics,
90(2): 167-92.
10.
Environmental Economics (including sustainable development and climate
change):
Ng, Y.K. and Wills, I. (2002).
Welfare economics and sustainable development, in Knowledge for Sustainable Development - An Insight into the Encyclopedia of Life Support Systems, UNESCO Publishing
/ EOLSS Publishers, Paris, France, Oxford, UK. Vol. 3, pp. 485-506.
Sustainable development: A problem of
environmental disruption now instead of intertemporal
ethics, Sustainable Development,
2004, 12: 150-60.
* Optimal environmental charges/taxes: Easy to estimate and
surplus-yielding, Environmental and
Resource Economics, 2004, 28(4):395-408.
– At least desirable to tax disruption at the marginal
cost of abatement which is easier to estimate than the marginal damage of
disruption.
Eternal Coase and
external costs: A case for
bilateral taxation and amenity rights”,
European Journal of Political Economy, 2007,
23: 641-59. [Awarded Best Paper
Prize at the Economics and Environment Network National Workshop 2005,
Australian National University.]
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/B6V97-4NNWCB6-1/2/1f85df021797d9d310883289c084eb86
*
Consumption tradeoff vs. catastrophes avoidance:
Implications of some recent results in happiness studies on the economics of
climate change, Climatic Change, 2011, 105(1): 109-127. – Argues that the problem of climate change is
not so much trading off consumption now with the future but that of reducing
the probability of catastrophes and that this strengthens the need for
immediate and strong actions.
http://www.springerlink.com.ezproxy.lib.monash.edu.au/content/kqm7g44747071460/fulltext.pdf
Beyond Economics:
11.
Providing a strong moral philosophical
support for utilitarianism:
* Bentham or Bergson? Finite sensibility, utility functions
and social welfare functions, Review of Economic Studies, 1975, pp.
545-570. – Shows that, with compelling axioms and the recognition of finite
discriminatory power, what the society should maximize should be the unweighted
sum of individual utilities/welfares.
Expected subjective utility: Is the Neumann-Morgenstern utility the
same as the Neoclassical’s?,
Social Choice and Welfare, 1984,
177-186.
Ng, Yew-Kwang & Peter Singer (1981).
An argument for utilitarianism, Canadian
Journal of Philosophy, 11: 229-239.
Ng, Yew-Kwang & Peter Singer (1990).
An argument for utilitarianism: A defence, Australasian
Journal of Philosophy, 68(4): 448-454.
Welfarism and utilitarianism:
A rehabilitation, Utilitas, November 1990, 2(2):
171-193.
12.
Proposing welfare biology:
* Towards
welfare biology: Evolutionary
economics of animal consciousness and suffering, Biology & Philosophy,
Vol. 10, No. 3, pp. 255-285. – Combines economic analysis and the principles of
natural selection to provide insights on some tricky questions of animal
welfare such as: Which species are capable of welfare? Whether their welfare
levels are positive or negative? How could welfare be increased?
http://www.springerlink.com/content/uj81758r187l7777/
13.
Solving
the moral philosophical dilemma of optimal population:
* What should we do about future generations? The impossibility of Parfit’s
Theory X, Economics and Philosophy,
1989, 5: 135-253.
Social criteria for evaluating population
change: An alternative to the Blackorby-Donaldson Criterion”, Journal of Public Economics, 1986, 29: 375-381.
14. Happiness
studies, including proposing a way to measure happiness more cardinally and
interpersonally more comparably, and a new national success indicator:
* Happiness surveys: Some comparability
issues and an exploratory survey based on just perceivable increments, Social Indicators Research, 38(1): 1-29,
May 1996.
The East-Asian
happiness gap, Pacific Economic Review, 2002,
7(1): 51-63.
Happiness studies: Ways to improve comparability and some public policy
implications, Economic Record, June 2008, 84:253-66.
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com.ezproxy.lib.monash.edu.au/doi/10.1111/j.1475-4932.2008.00466.x/pdf
* Environmentally responsible happy
nation index, Social Indicators Research,
2008, 85:425–446.
http://www.springerlink.com.ezproxy.lib.monash.edu.au/content/qu587565w3277471/fulltext.pdf
15. Contributing
towards the solution of the mystery of the origin of the universe and part
solution to the problem of the lack of time on Earth for evolution:
Complex niches favour rational species, Journal of Theoretical Biology, April
1996, 179(4): 303-311.
* On the origin of our cosmos: A
proposition of axiomatic cosmic consciousness, Journal of Cosmology, 2011, Vol 13, 3754-3764.
http://journalofcosmology.com/QuantumCosmos113.html
* How Did the Universe Come About? Axiomatic
Evolutionary Creationism, Fudan University Press, August 2011. ISBN: 978-7-309-08189-3/P.007.
http://www.fudanpress.com/root/showdetail.asp?bookid=7233