An Assessment of Important Issues Concerning the Application of Benefit-Cost Analysis to Social Policy
An Assessment of Important Issues Concerning the Application of Benefit-Cost Analysis to Social Policy
复制标题
关于将效益成本分析应用于社会政策的重要问题的评估
DOI：
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发表时间：
2010
影响因子：
3.4
通讯作者：
D. Weimer
中科院分区：
文献类型：
--
作者：
A. Vining;D. Weimer
效益成本分析（BCA）提供了系统评估公共政策效率的框架。 BCA 越来越多地应用于社会政策，从学前干预到监狱重返计划。这些应用程序具有巨大的潜力，可以帮助确定可提供最佳公共投资回报的政策，旨在帮助弱势群体或以其他方式改善社会生活。然而，将 BCA 应用到社会政策中会带来许多挑战。评估社会政策的综合方法通常需要根据多个来源的数据并使用可用的影子价格进行预测。由于这些预测和影子价格本质上是不确定的，因此必须做出特别努力来明确解决由此产生的净收益预测的不确定性。预测和评估因成瘾等行为而变得复杂，这些行为显然不满足新古典福利经济学的假设。由于分配目标往往是社会政策的明确动机，因此 BCA 可能是公共政策目的的不完整框架，除非分析人员能够找到方法将人们为整个社会消费分配变化付费的意愿纳入其中。如果 BCA 要发挥其促进良好社会政策的潜力，分析师必须意识到这些挑战，研究人员必须帮助解决这些挑战。
Benefit-cost analysis (BCA) provides a framework for systematically assessing the efficiency of public policies. Increasingly, BCA is being applied to social policies, ranging from preschool interventions to prison reentry programs. These applications offer great potential for helping to identify policies that offer the best returns on public investments aimed at helping the disadvantaged or otherwise improving social life. However, applying BCA to social policies pose a number of challenges. The need for a comprehensive approach to assessing social policies generally requires making predictions based on data from multiple sources and using available shadow prices. As these predictions and shadow prices are inherently uncertain, special effort must be made to explicitly address the resulting uncertainty of predictions of net benefits. Prediction and valuation are complicated by behaviors, such as addiction, that do not clearly satisfy the assumptions of neoclassical welfare economics. As distributional goals are often an explicit motivation for social policies, BCA may be an incomplete framework for public policy purposes unless analysts can find ways to incorporate people's willingness to pay for changes in the distribution of consumption across society. If BCA is to reach its potential for contributing to good social policy, analysts must be aware of these challenges and researchers must help address them.