Amazon.com description: Product Description: This third volume of the proceedings of the International Economic Association Congress in Moscow in 1992 contains twelve papers by eminent economists on public policy and economic organization. The papers span a wide variety of topics. The first section considers the basic principles of ethics and welfare economics. The remaining sections concentrate on two areas in which the expertise of public economists is particularly valuable, namely the transition from planned to market economies and the distributional effects of public policy measures. In the papers on transition controversial topics are analysed: for example, Flemming puts the case for wage subsidies; and Kleindorf and Sertel suggest privatization by way of workers' enterprises (where shares in the equity of the firm are sold to both present and future employees competitively). The papers on distributional effects deal with redistribution of income by means of public expenditure. The most important distributional instruments, treated in several papers, are cash transfers (Atkinson), non-cash benefits (Saunders et al.), public old age insurance (Bos) and public health insurance (Pauly).