Abstract

The contribution explores the possibility of an economic reading of Alexy’s work on proportionality. It contends that there are several economic elements and aspects in Alexy’s theory. These suggest that a cost-benefit analysis of proportionality is possible and useful for decision purposes. However, Alexy’s views on Pareto efficiency suffer from the failure to distinguish Pareto superiority from Pareto optimality and the failure to apply Kaldor-Hicks efficiency to balancing decisions. The paper concludes that, all things considered, an economic reading of Alexy’s work is possible and useful, especially if some controversial aspects of it are given an ordinal rather than cardinal interpretation.