From Scholarly Idea to Budgetary Institution:

The Emergence of Cost-Benefit Analysis

Originally published in Constitutional Political Economy

Cost-Benefit Analysis (CBA) is typically portrayed as a technique for promoting efficiency in government. The authors don’t deny that CBA can be used in this manner, but instead focus on a different property of CBA, namely, its evolution from scholarly musings into a framing institution within which budgetary processes operate.

Cost-Benefit Analysis (CBA) is typically portrayed as a technique for promoting efficiency in government. The authors don’t deny that CBA can be used in this manner, but instead focus on a different property of CBA, namely, its evolution from scholarly musings into a framing institution within which budgetary processes operate. The evolution of CBA into institutional status, moreover, shows the value of bringing a polyarchical perspective to bear on fiscal organization, wherein budgetary outcomes emerge through structured interaction among participants. CBA is a product of interaction within a political ecology, as distinct from being the product of some person’s optimizing choice.

Read the article at SpringerLink

To speak with a scholar or learn more on this topic, visit our contact page.

Mercatus AI Assistant
Ask questions about this research.
GPT Logo
Mercatus AI Research Assistant
Ask questions about this research. Mercatus Chatbot AI More Details
Suggested Prompts:
Ask us anything. We use OpenAI's ChatGPT 4o base model to answer any question about Mercatus research.