Abstract EN:

It is today hugely accepted that the economic status of the individuals and the social welfare are in essence multidimensional phenomena. Despite this obviousness, economists have been recently interested in this topic and much applied comparisons of countries on the basis of their performance in achieving better redistributive objectives continue to be performed in terms of monetary income. Following seminal contributions of Kolm (1977, QJE) or Atkinson and Bourguignon (1982, RES) and the recent literature, the topic of this thesis is to show the relevance of the multidimensional appraisal of societies. In other words, the question is: what information does the multidimensional methodology provide us? This thesis tries to answer to this question through three contributions. The first one propose an international comparison of developed countries in terms of their normative performance in allocating disposable income and regional public goods (health and education) to their citizens based on robust multidimensional dominance criteria and we show that the picture of the relative standing of countries is significantly affected. The second contribution proposes a methodology for comparing socially risky situations form a normative point of view. This methodology allows us to say that, for single workers, the United States are not more precarious than France. Finally the purpose of the third contribution is to verify whether or not the Canadian equalization payments scheme succeeds in reaching its redistributive objective. We show that there are some doubts on the distributional accomplishments of the Canadian equalization payment scheme