In this book, the authors reconceptualize cost-benefit analysis, arguing that its objective should be overall well-being rather than economic efficiency. This book not only places cost-benefit analysis on a firmer theoretical foundation, but also has many practical implications for how government agencies should undertake cost-benefit studies.

What is the effect of a new infrastructure on the well-being of a local community? Is a tax reform desirable? Does the privatization of a telecommunication provider increase social welfare? To answer these questions governments and their policy advisors should have in mind an operative definition of social welfare, and cannot rely on simple official statistics, such as GDP. The price we observe are often misleading as welfare signals, and costs and benefits for the society should be based on ‘shadow prices’, revealing the social opportunity costs of goods and of changes of the world. This book explains how to apply these welfare economics ideas to the real world. After a theoretical discussion of the concept of social welfare, a critical analysis of the traditional doctrine of welfare economics embodied in the Two Fundamental Theorems, and a presentation of social cost-benefit analysis, the book introduce the readers to an applied framework. This includes the empirical estimation of shadow prices of goods, of the social cost of labour and capital, the assessment of risk. This book also includes the state of the art of international experience with CBA, including ex-post evaluation of major projects, economic rates of return in different sectors, and a case study on privatisation, is presented. This book offers a unique and original blend of theory, empirics and experience. The theoretical discussion clarifies why shadow prices are not virtual market equilibrium prices, as they arise as the solution of a planning problem, often with governments and economic agents constrained in their information and powers. The empirical chapters show how to compute proxies of the shadow prices in simple ways. The experience chapters draw from first hand research, gained by the Author and his collaborators over many years of advisory work for the European Commission and other international and national institutions.

Disputes over government policies rage in a number of areas. From taxation to climate change, from public finance to risk regulation, and from health care to infrastructure planning, advocates debate how policies affect multiple dimensions of individual well-being, how these effects balance against each other, and how trade-offs between overall well-being and inequality should be resolved. How to measure and balance well-being gains and losses is a vexed issue. Matthew D. Adler advances the debate by introducing the social welfare function (SWF) framework and demonstrating how it can be used as a powerful tool for evaluating governmental policies. The framework originates in welfare economics and in philosophical scholarship regarding individual well-being, ethics, and distributive justice. It has three core components: a well-being measure, which translates each of the possible policy outcomes into an array of interpersonally comparable well-being numbers, quantifying how well off each person in the population would be in that outcome; a rule for ranking outcomes thus described ; and an uncertainty module, which orders policies understood as probability distributions over outcomes. The SWF framework is a significant improvement compared to cost-benefit analysis (CBA), which quantifies policy impacts in dollars, is thereby biased towards the rich, and is insensitive to the distribution of these monetized impacts. The SWF framework, by contrast, uses an unbiased measure of well-being and allows the policymaker to consider both efficiency (total well-being) and equity (the distribution of well-being). Because the SWF framework is a fully generic methodology for policy assessment, Adler also discusses how it can be implemented to inform government policies. He illustrates it through a detailed case study of risk regulation, contrasting the implications of results of SWF and CBA. This book provides an accessible, yet rigorous overview of the SWF approach that can inform policy-makers and students.

Applied Welfare Economics: Cost-Benefit Analysis for Project and Policy Evaluation presents a consistent framework for applied welfare economics and is grounded in a comprehensive theory of cost-benefit analysis, specifically focused on offering a practical approach to policy and project evaluation. After opening with a theoretical discussion of the concept of social welfare, a critical analysis of the traditional doctrine of welfare economics embodied in the Two Fundamental Theorems, and a presentation of social cost-benefit analysis, the book introduces readers to an applied framework. This includes the empirical estimation of shadow prices of goods, the social cost of labour and capital, and the assessment of risk. The book also examines real-life experiences with cost-benefit analysis, including ex-post evaluation of major projects, economic rates of return in different sectors, and a case study on privatisation. These chapters draw on first-hand research gained by the author team from years of advisory work for the European Commission and other international and national institutions. This second edition presents updated data, more international examples, and more coverage of topics such as very long run discounting effects and climate change as an intergenerational effect. It also includes more practical examples and end-of-chapter questions to aid student’s learning. Applied Welfare Economics is a valuable textbook for upper-level courses on welfare economics, cost-benefit analysis, public policy analysis and related areas.

The author introduces "the foundation of relevant economic theory," outlines "the steps involved in a typical cost-benefit analysis," and addresses "topics such as consumer surplus, compensating variation, equivalent variation, shadow pricing, income distribution, and much more."--Cover.

Drawing on the principles of welfare economics and public finance, this second edition of Cost-Benefit Analysis: Theory and Application provides the theoretical foundation for a general framework within which costs and benefits are identified and assessed from a societal perspective. With a thorough coverage of cost-benefit concepts and their underlying theory, the volumecarries the reader through the steps of a typical evaluation process, including the identification, measurement, and comparison of costs and benefits, and project selection. Topics include alternative measures of welfare change, such as the concepts of consumer surplus and compensating and equivalent variation measures, shadow pricing, nonmarket valuation techniques of contingent valuation and discrete choice experiment, perspectives on what constitutes a theoretically acceptable discount rate, the social rate of time preference, income distribution, and much more. The book also focuses on real-world applications of cost-benefit analysis in two closely related areas—environment and health care—followed by an examination of the current state of the art in cost-benefit analysis as practiced by international agencies.

A comprehensive and authoritative introduction to cost-benefit analysis that aims to be readable and user-friendly.

In Well-Being and Fair Distribution: Beyond Cost-Benefit Analysis, author Matthew D. Adler provides readers with a comprehensive, philosophically grounded argument for the use of social welfare functions as a framework for governmental policy analysis--a framework that is welfarist but not utilitarian, and sensitive to the distribution of human well-being. Well-Being and Fair Distribution addresses a range of relevant theoretical issues, including the nature of well-being and the possibility of interpersonal welfare comparisons; the moral value of equality, and how that bears on the form of the social welfare function; social choice under uncertainty; and the integration of individual responsibility into the social-welfare function approach. Adler also explores issues of implementation by looking at how survey data and other sources of evidence might be used to calibrate both a well-being metric and a social welfare function, and discussing whether distributive goals are ever best pursued through regulation rather than the tax system. In working through this range of theoretical and practical issues, Well-Being and Fair Distribution draws from a wide variety of literatures, including philosophical scholarship on equality, "prioritarianism," responsibility, well-being, and personal identity over time; the social choice literature within economics; applied economic literatures concerning the measurement of inequality and poverty; legal and policy-analytic scholarship on cost-benefit analysis, environmental justice, and the choice between regulation and taxation; and the burgeoning field of "happiness studies."