Cost-benefit analysis: What limits its use in policy making and how to make it more usable? A case study on climate change adaptation in Germany

Take the general problem that someone has in terms of distributing information out to the larger project team. If a project team member says they never got the updated plans, they go and build against those plans and then now you’ve been asked to basically pay for its demolition and rebuild. When you have a solution that prevents that, where you can prove that, yes, you did send that information out, it was distributed, you know when that party received it and who received it, you’ve avoided that disaster. But asking someone on a project team, “Well, how often are you likely to have these disasters?

• Then with some fancy calculations, he was able to recommend a toll amount that took into account the costs and benefits of his bridge.
• Decision makers then can adjust their use of the results based on the sensitivity analysis.
• What I mean by that is how do you want to take those benefits and actually translate those into tangible numbers and actual ROI that you can get your arms behind?
• The equity and distributional impacts should be fully described, and disaggregated impacts across relevant subgroups (by socioeconomic status, cultural background and geographical location) should be quantified where appropriate.
• “[Cost benefit analysis] assumes that a monetary value can be placed on all the costs and benefits of a program, including tangible and intangible returns.
• This allows the analyst to demonstrate the impact of key parameters, such as the time horizon or the discount rate, on the economic credentials of prevention interventions.
• Executing CBA aids in comparing distinct projects in terms of net benefits irrespective of dissimilarities along with considering indirect assistance/costs such as customer satisfaction or executive’s spirit.

If the costs outweigh the benefits, ask yourself if there are alternatives to the proposal you haven’t considered. Additionally, you may be able to identify cost reductions that will allow you to reach your goals more affordably while still being effective. For your analysis to be as accurate as possible, you must first establish the framework within which you’re conducting it.

Assign a Dollar Amount or Value to Each Cost and Benefit

In some cases geography could play a role in determining feasibility of a project or initiative. If geographically dispersed stakeholders or groups will be affected by the decision being analyzed, make sure to build that into the framework upfront, to avoid surprises what is a cost benefit analysis down the road. Conversely, if the scope of the project or initiative may scale beyond the intended geographic parameters, that should be taken into consideration as well. In business today, it’s essential to get the most out of every idea, option, and investment.

Based on the most contemporary Australian data, the authors recommended a VSL of A$ 7 million and a VSLY of A$ 303,531 (in 2017 values), with additional values for sensitivity analyses [76]. NSW Health Infrastructure [37] uses the PM&C [74] VSLY value and recommends that it be used to assign a monetary value to a DALY. However, the two guidelines use different inflation indices, and therefore the recommended VSL/VSLY differs between the two guidelines. NSW Health Infrastructure reports that the VSLY is a value of a year of perfect health [37].

Establish a Framework for Your Analysis

Therefore, it would still give citizens the means to hold decision-makers responsible in the same way a stronger use of CBA would let them do. Furthermore, it would allow for future revision of a CBA because it would give people time to investigate who was given standing in the policymaking process and what populations the decision-makers overlooked. The CBA procedure itself involves some costs and benefits, the costs incorporate the time required to interpret and anticipate all pieces of the rewards and costs.

The use of the Framework will facilitate the development of empirical evidence that can be used in future evaluations. Thirdly, the acceptance and use of the Framework will also require treasury departments to better understand the unique features of preventive health interventions and to accept the deviations away from the current treasury guidance. This process is likely to be time- and resource-intensive for both health and treasury departments and will require a close and effective working relationship between them. Despite the large commitment required, governments are gradually moving towards mandated CBA processes [4, 33, 40, 41], and therefore the health sector must adapt so that preventive health analyses are useful to both central and sector-specific decision-making. The discount rate used in economic analyses is an important topic that remains hotly debated nationally and internationally, with little consensus amongst academics and government departments [29, 59, 90]. Key topics of debate include whether the basis of the discount rate for public policy appraisals should be the opportunity cost of capital, the social rate of time preference, or variations/combinations of the two [4, 33, 59, 62, 63, 91].

Benefits and limitations of cost-benefit analysis

A third is to provide acceptability curves, which relate the probability of acceptance of an intervention to the willingness to pay for a given benefit at a given cost. Each of these three methods provides exactly the same information about uncertainty in benefit-cost or cost-effectiveness analyses. Which is chosen depends on the research and on the decision maker’s comfort in understanding heterogeneity. One approach could be to include as evidence only the results of randomized controlled trials or regression discontinuity studies.

Though no empirical evidence exists on the issue, researchers tend to assume that policy makers do not want to know about uncertainties. Give me a number.” But even if a decision maker does not want to know about uncertainty, the uncertainty remains important, Basu insisted, because the production function for the data is often nonlinear with respect to its many inputs. With a nonlinear function, the expectation of the function is not equal to the function of the expectation of inputs.

NSW line agencies (Health Infrastructure [37], Transport for NSW [8] and NSW Planning, Industry and Environment [7]) guidance documents cite NSW Treasury [4] guidance. Health and safety are often given as examples of impacts that are difficult to forecast [4, 37, 45]. NSW Treasury [4] specifically identifies the difficulties in estimating the effects of a programme where there may be multiple possible causes for the outcomes of interest, and impacts related to behaviour change. Both these issues are particularly relevant to preventive health interventions—however, no solutions are identified in the guidelines [4]. NSW Health Infrastructure [37] reports that the key difference between CBA in the health sector and other sectors is the complex interplay of factors that determine health in a community. These guidelines categorize health benefits according to impacts on healthcare service streams (emergency department, cancer services, etc.) with detailed methods for the quantification of benefits in disability-adjusted life-years (DALYs) [73].

This way, governments cannot lie about a policy or deem one life more valuable than another without being scrutinized by the public. The second reason governments use CBA to make public policy decisions is because it maximizes financial resources in order to yield the greatest net benefit of welfare. Similarly, it allows governments to focus only on the promotion of welfare a policy is expected to promote and https://www.bookstime.com/ not the distribution of costs and benefits. This decreases the intellectual burden on policymakers because it narrows the considerations they have to account for to evaluate policies. Policy-makers could be tempted to disproportionately give standing to the groups that a policy will benefit the most, making the overall welfare the policy would promote in society skewed upward and toward specific populations.

It is recommended that the friction cost approach (FCA), which estimates short-term productivity losses incurred by employers in replacing a lost worker [80], be used to estimate the productivity impacts. Using highly individualized data to estimate productivity impacts may have adverse equity impacts [46], and therefore average gender-free wage rates should be used. Optional additional analyses using more individualized data could be undertaken; however, a full discussion of the distributional impact of the analyses should be included.

The municipal actors were asked about their perception of the usefulness of CBA, particularly in formulating policy options, and about the success factors and constraints connected to integrating cost-benefit results in policy making. The findings suggest that CBA is, above all, perceived as useful in raising awareness of environmental goods and in increasing the transparency of the policy-making process. Here, CBA was confirmed as useful for spurring a systematic discussion of the advantages and disadvantages of different adaptation measures. However, the municipal actors adopted a relatively critical stance towards using CBA as a decision criterion for prioritising measures. We conclude that, in this context, the participatory process of conducting the CBA, which takes municipal actors’ knowledge seriously into account, is important for the perception of the usefulness of its results in policy making. Framework recommendation The options for appraisal, assumptions and inputs used in the analysis with reference to evidence should be accurately and transparently documented.