Use of Paasche and Laspeyres Variations to Estimate Consumer Welfare Change

Many measurements of consumer welfare have been proposed to reflect the income equivalent of a welfare change Measures used in policy evaluations are compensating variation, equivalent variation, Paasche variation, Laspeyres variation, and consumer's surplus This research presents an empirical test for differences among these five welfare measures in a dynamic multimarket context We argue that in many policy evaluations, adequate and rigorous information for decisionmaking is supplied by estimates for the easily calculated Paasche and Laspeyres variations, and consumer's surplus measures