Séminaire NANCY – Romain ESPINOSA (CREM)

Détails de l'événement :

“Animals and social welfare”

Abstract: Cost-benefit analysis lacks the appropriate tools to economically value animal well-being. I propose an easily-implementable framework to evaluate the social gains of policies targeting animals. The model considers both the welfare of animals and the utility humans derive from animals’ well-being. The gains in animal welfare are estimated by considering the violations of the animals’ fundamental freedoms that the policy would prevent and are expressed in monetary equivalents using utility potential functions. I apply this framework to twenty policy proposals targeting wild, domestic, farmed, and laboratory animals. Although the policies benefit from a large popular support in France (yearly willingness-to-pays ranging from 15 and 39 euros per citizen), I show that they have very heterogeneous impacts on animal welfare (between 0.013 and 3,618 euros per citizen per year). I further show that humans’ altruistic concerns for animal are a poor predictor of the effective impact of policies on animal welfare. I conclude that it is essential to value animal welfare per se in cost-benefit analyses to determine the set of welfare-increasing policies.