Resource management decisions influence not only the output of the economy but also the distribution of utility between groups within the community. The theory of Benefit Cost Analysis provides a means of incorporating this distributional change through the application of distributional or...

We review the properties of the conventional static measure of changes in economic welfare, national income, in a dynamic economy. We show that it is possible to establish attractive welfare properties by rather simple arguments and that this variable can be estimated from current data. Its...

Benefit cost analysis (BCA) is a widely used method of assessing environmental policies. One of the limitations of BCA is the incorporation of equity considerations into an analysis. While this is theoretically possible through the application of distributional weights, this practice has not...

Cost-benefit analysis as performed by governments and public-sector organisations typically applies equal weights to changes in incomes accruing to individuals from projects even when there is no proposal to compensate losers. One reason for the use of equal weights despite the absence of a...

Kaplow (1996) and others argue forcefully in favor of using the standard cost-benefit test alone, without any distributional concern, given “standard simplifying assumptions.” This paper, on the contrary, demonstrates that distributional weights, equal to the social marginal utility of...

The optimal pollution abatement levels are found by maximizing global social welfare in a permits trade system under the constraint that environmental goods are evaluated equally in rich and poor countries. Evaluating equally environmental goods in poor and rich countries makes possible to build...

Differences in Value of Travel Time Savings (VTTS) between travel modes can play a decisive role in the ranking of projects that affect the travel time of different travel modes. Conceptually, between-mode differences in VTTS can be decomposed into the user type effect (UE) that accounts for...

The approximated cost-benefit function of pollution abatement from two integrated assessment models are employed in constructing of social welfare functions (SWF). Following a normative approach and evaluating equally the environmental goods in rich and poor countries, furthermore using...

In some cost benefit analysis (CBA) applications, such as those used for the valuation of climate change damage, distributional weights are used to account for diminishing utility of marginal income. This is usually done by means of intra-temporal distributional weights, which are combined with...