In most applied cost-benefit analyses, individual willingness to pay is aggregated without using explicit welfare weights. This can be justified by postulating a utilitarian social welfare function, along with the assumption of equal marginal utility of income for all individuals. However, since...

In traditional cost-benefit analyses of public projects, every citizen’s willingness to pay for a project is given an equal weight. This is sometimes taken to imply that cost-benefit analysis is a democratic method for making public decisions, as opposed to, for example, political processes...

Cost-benefit analysis have been attacked by many critics because of its implicit ethical assumptions. The normative content of the method is at odds with the common attitude that economists should analyze how to reach given goals, while determination of the goals should be left to the...

Members of the Norwegian Parliament were interviewed about the decision process concerning national road investments. Most of them found cost-benefit analysis useful, but apparently not as a device for ranking projects. Rather, the cost-benefit ratio was used to pick project proposals requiring...

Do households' recycling efforts represent a social cost, which should be taken into account in cost-benefit analyses of alternative waste treatment systems? Some argue that it should not, since recycling efforts are to a large extent voluntary. We demonstrate that if the government can...

A disaggregated intertemporal CGE model is used to simulate the welfare effects in Norway of the recently implemented trade reforms including the WTO agreement, the EEA treaty, the EFTA fishery agreement and an anticipated EEA resolution on shipbuilding. These reforms affect the Norwegian...

The effects on the degree of equality of reforms in indirect taxation are analysed by using a microsimulation model of the Norwegian economy subsequent to a CGE model. The two main reforms studied are substitution of a uniform VAT rate on all goods and services and substitution of the...

In this paper we introduce the notion of random expenditure function and derive the distribution of the expenditure function and corresponding compensated choice probabilities in the general case when the (random) utilities are nonlinear in income. We also derive formulae for expenditure and...

The aim of this paper is to discuss the social desirability of a treatment program for patients with dental fear. The program consisted of three different fear treatments, cognitive therapy, applied relaxation or nitrous oxide sedation, as well as dental treatment. To evaluate the effects of...

In addition to his role as a consumer pursuing his own interests, an individual may also regard himself as an ethical observer, judging matters from society's point of view. It is not clear which of these possibly conflicting roles respondents in contingent valuation studies take on. This leads...