There is an increasing demand for transport decisions to be made in thelight of some form of what may generically be called cost benefit analysis(CBA). The actual techniques may vary and often deviate quite significantlyfrom the conventional economic concept of CBA but in all cases theprocedures...

Wetlands all over the world have been lost or are threatened in spite of various international agreements and national policies. This is caused by: (1) the public nature of many wetlands products and services; (2) user externalities imposed on other stakeholders; and (3) policy intervention...

We assess the monetary value of the noise damage, caused by aircraft noise nuisance around Amsterdam Airport, as the sum of hedonic house price differentials and a residual cost component. The residual costs are assessed from a survey, including an ordinal life satisfaction scale, on which...

The advantages and disadvantages of genetic modification of organisms in agriculture are reviewed. These relate to the environment, human health, socio-economic effects, population growth, and differential consequences for developed and developing countries. An overall evaluation requires that...

In this paper we evaluate the QALY loss, which may be assigned to the prevalence of specific chronic illnesses and physical handicaps. The analysis is based on an individual self-rating health satisfaction question asked in the British Household Panel Survey data set. This question provides a...

This review considers the role of environmental effects in transport investment appraisal, mainly from the perspective of cost-benefit analysis, the most widely adopted appraisal technique. Although the basic principles of CBA are straightforward, several complications are identified that may...

This paper uses the Kaldor-Hicks compensation principle to compute the present value (PV) of a non-marginal future event. Three theoretical results stand out: First, decreasing returns to capital create a wedge between the PV of future generations' willingness to pay (WTP) and the PV of their...

Gollier and Weitzman (2010) show that if future consumption discount rates are uncertain and persistent, the consumption discount rate should decline to its lowest possible value for events in the most distant future. In this paper, I argue that the lowest possible growth rate of consumption per...

This paper discusses a number of issues centred around the evaluation of the benefits and costs of transport. It is argued that, for various reasons, transport cannot be treated as an ‘ordinary’ economic sector, and in the paper the policy implications of a number of the sector’s...

An expected utility based cost-benefit analysis is in general fragile to its distributional assumptions. We derive necessary and sufficient conditions on the utility function of the expected utility model to avoid this. The conditions ensure that expected (marginal) utility remains finite also...