Cost–benefit and water resources policy: a survey

Water Policy ◽  
2011 ◽  
Vol 14 (2) ◽  
pp. 250-280 ◽  
Author(s):  
Frank A. Ward
Keyword(s):  
Water Policy ◽  
Cost Benefit Analysis ◽  
Cost Benefit ◽  
Benefit Analysis ◽  
Trade Offs ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Recent Developments ◽  
The Difference ◽  
Policy Cost ◽  
The Right

This paper reviews recent developments in cost–benefit analysis for water policy researchers who wish to understand the applications of economic principles to inform emerging water policy debates. The cost–benefit framework can provide a comparison of total economic gains and losses resulting from a proposed water policy. Cost–benefit analysis can provide decision-makers with a comparison of the impacts of two or more water policy options using methods that are grounded in time-tested economic principles. Economic efficiency, measured as the difference between added benefits and added costs, can inform water managers and the public of the economic impacts of water programs to address peace, development, health, the environment, climate and poverty. Faced by limited resources, cost–benefit analysis can inform policy choices by summarizing trade-offs involved in designing, applying, or reviewing a wide range of water programs. The data required to conduct a cost–benefit analysis are often poor but the steps needed to carry out that analysis require posing the right questions.

Tackling conservation/welfare conflicts in the management of wild animals

2002 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 36 ◽  
Author(s):  
James K. Kirkwood
Keyword(s):  
Review Process ◽  
Biological Diversity ◽  
Cost Benefit Analysis ◽  
Species Conservation ◽  
Cost Benefit ◽  
Ethical Review ◽  
Benefit Analysis ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Ethical Review Process

During the last century there were two distinct and profound changes in attitudes to animals. First, it became widely understood that human activities and anthropogenic changes to the environment present a serious threat to biological diversity. In response to this many programmes to protect habitat and to conserve species have been launched. Second, advances in various fields of science led to a strengthening belief in many societies that a wide range of animals may have the capacity for consciousness and thus suffering. This has led to growing concern for the welfare of animals - the quality of their lives - and to the development of extensive bodies of welfare legislation in many countries. Concerns for species conservation and concerns for individual animal welfare do not always pull in the same direction. Around the world, conflicts are becoming commonplace between those who believe it can be justifiable to compromise the interests of individual animals in order to prevent species extinctions and those who do not. Such conflicts may be addressed and hopefully avoided or minimized through use of an ethical review process in which conservation benefits and welfare costs are carefully identified, considered and weighed in a cost/benefit analysis. A second function of this review process is to ensure that, where the decision is taken to proceed with a conservation programme that may adversely affect the welfare of some individuals, all necessary steps are taken to minimize these threats and their possible impacts.

scholarly journals Warum Nachhaltigkeitsbeurteilungen Alternativen zu Kosten-Nutzen-Analysen erfordern

2011 ◽  
Vol 162 (11) ◽  
pp. 412-420
Author(s):  
Gertrude Hirsch Hadorn ◽  
Urs Allenspach ◽  
Georg Brun
Keyword(s):  
Sustainable Development ◽  
Forest Ecosystems ◽  
Sustainable Forest Management ◽  
Life Support ◽  
Cost Benefit Analysis ◽  
Cost Benefit ◽  
Benefit Analysis ◽  
Trade Offs ◽  
Sustainability Assessments ◽  
Critical Limits

Why alternatives to cost-benefit analysis in sustainability assessments are necessary Policies for sustainable forest management aim at maintaining forest ecosystems for sustainable development. Sustainable development as a societal mission comprises a diversity of factors that are neither hierarchically ordered nor freely compensable. Policies must therefore be assessed by a multidimensional criterion. Cost-benefit analysis provides a clear recommendation for a rational choice of policy. However, from a sustainability perspective, cost-benefit analysis has disadvantages, due to its methodological basis. Monetization and aggregation of preferences leave the reasons for measured preferences intransparent; trade-offs can occur arbitrarily; and it is not registered, whether and how critical limits of life support systems are affected. Avoiding these problems calls for assessment methods without aggregation or synthesising across heterogeneous standards. Dynamic decision theory provides ideas on how rational decisions can be taken based on a plurality of standards. The crucial ideas are prevention, precommitment, and a memory of past decisions. These can already be found in practice.

scholarly journals Some Costs & Benefits of Cost-Benefit Analysis

Daedalus ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 150 (3) ◽  
pp. 208-219
Author(s):  
Cass R. Sunstein
Keyword(s):  
Choice Theory ◽  
Cost Benefit Analysis ◽  
Cost Benefit ◽  
Benefit Analysis ◽  
Costs And Benefits ◽  
Administrative State ◽  
Executive Orders ◽  
Political Preferences ◽  
The Right ◽  
The Cost

Abstract The American administrative state has become a cost-benefit state, at least in the sense that prevailing executive orders require agencies to proceed only if the benefits justify the costs. Some people celebrate this development; others abhor it. For defenders of the cost-benefit state, the antonym of their ideal is, alternately, regulation based on dogmas, intuitions, pure expressivism, political preferences, or interest-group power. Seen most sympathetically, the focus on costs and benefits is a neo-Benthamite effort to attend to the real-world consequences of regulations, and it casts a pragmatic, skeptical light on modern objections to the administrative state, invoking public-choice theory and the supposedly self-serving decisions of unelected bureaucrats. The focus on costs and benefits is also a valuable effort to go beyond coarse arguments, from both the right and the left, that tend to ask this unhelpful question: “Which side are you on?” In the future, however, there will be much better ways, which we might consider neo-Millian, to identify those consequences: 1) by relying less on speculative ex ante projections and more on actual evaluations; 2) by focusing directly on welfare and not relying on imperfect proxies; and 3) by attending closely to distributional considerations–on who is helped and who is hurt.

scholarly journals Structured and Unstructured Valuation

1994 ◽  
Vol 16 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
John Broome
Keyword(s):  
Cost Benefit Analysis ◽  
Cost Benefit ◽  
Benefit Analysis ◽  
Theoretical Structure ◽  
The Difference ◽  
Structured Approach

AbstractEconomists can value things for cost-benefit analysis using either a structured or an unstructured approach. The first imposes some theoretical structure on the valuation; the second does not. This paper explains the difference between the approaches and examines the relative merits of each. Cost-benefit analysis may be aimed at finding what would be the best action, or alternatively at finding which action should be done in a democracy. The paper explains the difference, and argues that the appropriate aim is the first. Given that, it comes down in favour of the structured approach to valuation. As an example, it discusses different approaches to valuing life in economics.

Same-sex marriage: the irrelevance of the economic approach to law

2010 ◽  
Vol 6 (2) ◽  
pp. 139-149
Author(s):  
Mark D. White
Keyword(s):  
Economic Analysis ◽  
Cost Benefit Analysis ◽  
Cost Benefit ◽  
Economic Approach ◽  
Economic Analysis Of Law ◽  
Benefit Analysis ◽  
Same Sex ◽  
Same Sex Marriage ◽  
The Core ◽  
Trade Offs

AbstractSeveral noted legal scholars, most prominently Richard Posner, have applied the economic analysis of law to the debate over same-sex marriage. In this note, I argue that the economic approach to law is ill-equipped to deal with the issues of principle, dignity and rights that are at the core of the debate, regardless of the position taken on the issue. Other scholars, such as Darren Bush, acknowledge the shortcomings of the economic approach, such as the importance of the assumptions on which cost-benefit analysis is made, but they do not appreciate that this is symptomatic of the economic approach as a whole, not merely the application of it by some scholars in some cases. My contention is that the economic approach to law is appropriate regarding issues of policy, where trade-offs are essential and necessary, but not regarding issues of principle, with which trade-offs are not so easily made.

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