E00 - Macroeconomics and Monetary Economics: GeneralReturn

Macroeconomic policy is often evaluated solely on the basis of empirical evidence, such as observing the behavior of macroaggregates. This paper argues that this approach bears a shortcoming: "improvement" of macroaggregates can be socially undesirable under certain circumstances. Thus the sole exploration of macroaggregates is not sufficient to evaluate the macroeconomic policy -axiomatic economic theory must be used as well to determine whether the outcomes of macroeconomic policy are beneficial to society or not. The paper first offers a precise definition of a social welfare function (based as much as possible on microfoundations). Then it considers the possibility that macroaggregates might not always correlate with society's welfare. Some illustrations are covered too.