Compare methods

	Benefit-Cost Analysis for Policy	Multi-Criteria Policy Analysis
Field	Public Policy	Public Policy
Family	Process / pipeline	MCDM
Year of origin	2018	2002
Originator	Welfare-economics tradition; Boardman, Greenberg, Vining & Weimer (synthesis)	Valerie Belton & Theodor Stewart (synthesis); MCDA tradition
Type	Monetised economic appraisal of policy options	Multi-criteria decision analysis applied to policy appraisal
Seminal source	Boardman, A. E., Greenberg, D. H., Vining, A. R., & Weimer, D. L. (2018). Cost-Benefit Analysis: Concepts and Practice (5th ed.). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN: 9781108415996	Belton, V., & Stewart, T. J. (2002). Multiple Criteria Decision Analysis: An Integrated Approach. Boston: Kluwer Academic Publishers. ISBN: 9780792375050
Aliases	Cost-Benefit Analysis in Policy, Policy Benefit-Cost Analysis, Social Benefit-Cost Analysis, BCA	Multi-Criteria Analysis for Policy, MCDA Policy Appraisal, MCA in Policy, Multi-Criteria Policy Appraisal
Related	3	3
Summary	Benefit-cost analysis (BCA), also called cost-benefit analysis, is a systematic appraisal that values all the material consequences of a policy in money, discounts them to present value, and recommends the option with the greatest net social benefit. Grounded in welfare economics and the compensation principle, it asks whether the gains to those who benefit exceed the losses to those who bear the costs across society as a whole. Set out comprehensively in Boardman, Greenberg, Vining and Weimer's standard textbook and operationalised by government guidance such as the UK Treasury's Green Book, BCA is the principal efficiency test applied to public investments and regulations.	Multi-criteria policy analysis applies multi-criteria decision analysis (MCDA) to appraise and rank policy options against several, often conflicting, objectives that cannot be reduced to a single money metric. Each option is scored on a set of explicit criteria — economic, social, environmental, distributional — the criteria are weighted to reflect their relative importance, and the scores are aggregated into an overall value that ranks the options. Set out comprehensively in Belton and Stewart's 2002 textbook and operationalised for government in the UK's widely used Multi-Criteria Analysis Manual, the approach makes the trade-offs in a policy decision transparent and structured rather than implicit.