Refah iktisadının teorik temelleri: Piyasa ve refah ilişkisi

Abstract

ABSTRACT The main purpose of this thesis is to inquire the link between market mechanism and welfare in the light of the literature on welfare economics. The first and second chapters of the thesis are about classical and neoclassical welfare theory. The outcome documented in the conclusion is that new welfare economics has foreseen the perfect competitive market as a fundamental institution, providing individual well-being and social welfare achieved through individual welfare. A. K. Sen has recalled that welfare is a concept which can not be reduced to material wealth of a human-being. In his analysis, welfare is integrated with the concepts of freedom and rights of individual. Sen's approach is contradicted with the classical (without Marx) and the neoclassical approaches which constructed a society under the hiphothetical assumption of perfectly competitive markets where welfare is reduced to an economic conception, which was assumed to increase with exchange between individuals. Conforming with Sen's perspective, this essay has tried to investigate the relationship between market mechanism and welfare. In the third chapter of the thesis, which is focused on market failures, the answers provided to the critical question in the welfare economics `what to do provide individual and social welfare if markets are far from the ideal one` is investigated. Welfare economics also allowed state interventions if perfect competitive markets don't work. But welfare state experience observed in the all of the world has gone far beyond the institution which provides efficiency and welfare by overcoming the market failures. Welfare state has constructed its institutions and politics by accepting both even income distribution and efficient resource allocation which are the part of welfare. In the fourth chapter, it is argued that welfare has been described again through market rules and efficiency conception since 1970s, despite of welfare state characteristics; 143