Decisions on investing in health as well as other policies require deciding how to best allocate available resources - recognizing that using labor, materials, and other resources for one purpose means that they cannot be used for other purposes. Approaches for economic evaluation, including...

Abatement of global climate change is modeled as a two-period game between the industrialized "North" and developing "South." Using an integrated-assessment model to simulate the economic and environmental consequences of alternative abatement policies, cooperative and Nash solutions are...

Conventionally, benefit-cost analysis focuses on economic efficiency, summing the values of a policy’s costs and benefits based on the preferences of those affected. There is widespread agreement that it should be supplemented with information on how the impacts are distributed across...

Benefit-cost analysis and other forms of economic evaluation are powerful tools, encouraging the systematic collection and assessment of the evidence needed to support sound policy decisions. In low-and middle-income countries, where resources are very scarce and needs are very great, such...

In benefit-cost analysis, ideally the values placed on nonfatal risk reductions would reflect the preferences of those affected by a policy; i.e., individuals’ willingness to exchange their own income to achieve a reduction in their own risk. Presumably, this willingness to pay (WTP) accounts...

The estimates used to value mortality risk reductions are a major determinant of the benefits of many public health and environmental policies. These estimates (typically expressed as the value per statistical life, VSL) describe the willingness of those affected by a policy to exchange their...

In October 2010, a group of leading thinkers on environmental policy met at the Sustainable Consumption Institute at the University of Manchester for a conference in honour of Nobel Laureate Tom Schelling. This column presents a 10-point guideline for climate change policy co-authored by 26...