Critical aspects of economic calculation
Overview
Background & policy context:
The attention and reflection upon socio-economic evaluations of investments is constantly increasing. Many work-teams and public commissions in France tried to find a way to perform these evaluations, also by fixing unitary values for benefits and costs. In 2004, the French Government published guidelines and recommendations in order to perform evaluations in transport projects but the limits of these methods became evident quite soon: conflicting reactions, including hostile ones, emerging at the presentation of relevant infrastructure projects, had clearly shown the existing gap between economic calculations and public acceptance.
Objectives:
The research aimed to fill, at least partially, the gap between the economic calculation of investment projects and public acceptance, exploiting the most recent results from economic analysis and finding the best way to transmit experts' recommendations into public decisions.
Methodology:
The research work has been subdivided into twelve themes with a manager assigned to each of them: the objective was not to have twelve separated reports, but a unique report discussing globally all the themes.
The twelve themes were:
- Discount rate
- Shadow prices and monetization
- Climate changes
- Traffic studies
- Computable general equilibrium models: transport investments and economic activities
- Investment programs optimization and funding
- Spatial location and territorial effects
- Equity and redistributive effects
- Industrial economy and competitiveness
- Uncertainty and risk management
- Acceptability
- CBA: link from theory to practice, implementation problems and its position within the public debate.
Two workshops were organized in order to discuss globally the themes and to avoid a partial approach.
Share this page