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Benefit Incidence Analysis×Benefit-Cost Analysis for Policy×
FieldPublic PolicyPublic Policy
FamilyProcess / pipelineProcess / pipeline
Year of origin20002018
OriginatorPublic-finance and World Bank tradition; codified by Lionel DemeryWelfare-economics tradition; Boardman, Greenberg, Vining & Weimer (synthesis)
TypeDistributional analysis of public expenditureMonetised economic appraisal of policy options
Seminal sourceDemery, L. (2000). Benefit Incidence: A Practitioner's Guide. Washington, DC: World Bank, Poverty and Social Development Group, Africa Region. link ↗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
AliasesBIA, Benefit Incidence, Expenditure Incidence AnalysisCost-Benefit Analysis in Policy, Policy Benefit-Cost Analysis, Social Benefit-Cost Analysis, BCA
Related43
SummaryBenefit incidence analysis (BIA) assesses how the benefits of public spending on services such as education, health and subsidies are distributed across population groups, typically ranked by income or consumption. It combines data on who uses publicly provided services, drawn from household surveys, with the unit cost or subsidy the government provides per user, to estimate how much of total public spending each group captures. The result reveals whether public expenditure is progressive — favouring the poor — or regressive, and is a standard tool for analysing the distributional fairness of fiscal policy.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.
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ScholarGateCompare methods: Benefit Incidence Analysis · Benefit-Cost Analysis for Policy. Retrieved 2026-06-24 from https://scholargate.app/en/compare