Should we remain neutral between our interests and those of future generations? Or are we ethically permitted or even required to depart from neutrality and engage in some measure of intergenerational discounting? This Article addresses the problem of intergenerational discounting by drawing on...

Although benefit assessment principles are well established for specific populations, very little attention has been paid to how to define the scope of the pertinent population for such assessments. Whose social welfare matters and whose benefits should be included in the assessment? In the case...

This article argues that cultural values can act as dominant norms and subvert the state’s official law in the awarding of post-disaster shelters to Typhoon Ondoy (Tropical Storm Ketsana) victims in a housing project in the Philippines. Applying some tenets of legal pluralism and some...

In this paper we present a model designed to relate the detailed occupational and industrial demands imposed on the economy by several types of water resource investment. This detail provides the basis for adjusting the market cost of such public investments under the employment conditions...

This paper examines the social opportunity cost of a hypothetical public project in Australia and compares these values with the cost of the project as measured by factor prices. Since 2001, the Australian taxation system has included an ad valorem tax, the Goods and Services Tax, however...

This is a critique of the Arthur Maass article on Benefit Cost Analysis.

We modify a method recently suggested by Martin Weitzman (2012) for determining a risk-adjusted social discount rate (SDR) term structure consistent with both the (augmented) Ramsey rule and the consumption-based CAPM. Using this approach we estimate SDR for transportation infrastructure...

There are many reasons to suspect that benefit-cost analysis applied to environmental policies will result in policy decisions that will reject those environmental policies. The important question, of course, is whether those rejections are based on proper science. The present paper explores...

A number of governments have already adopted the policy of applying Declining Discount Rates (DDRs) to long lived projects, a move that will significantly affect public sector investment decisions. This paper argues that such policy is misguided, and revisits the discussion that led to it. A...

A number of governments have already adopted the policy of applying Declining Discount Rates (DDRs) to long lived projects, a move that could affect public sector investment decisions. Arguments for the use of Declining Discount Rates are based on the consideration of uncertainty, both for...