Compare methods

	Benefit Incidence Analysis	Cost-Utility Analysis
Field	Public Policy	Public Policy
Family	Process / pipeline	Process / pipeline
Year of origin	2000	2015
Originator	Public-finance and World Bank tradition; codified by Lionel Demery	Health-economics community; standardised by Drummond and colleagues
Type	Distributional analysis of public expenditure	Economic evaluation expressing outcomes in utility-weighted health
Seminal source	Demery, L. (2000). Benefit Incidence: A Practitioner's Guide. Washington, DC: World Bank, Poverty and Social Development Group, Africa Region.	Drummond, M. F., Sculpher, M. J., Claxton, K., Stoddart, G. L., & Torrance, G. W. (2015). Methods for the Economic Evaluation of Health Care Programmes (4th ed.). Oxford: Oxford University Press. ISBN: 9780199665877
Aliases	BIA, Benefit Incidence, Expenditure Incidence Analysis	CUA, Cost per QALY Analysis, QALY-Based Economic Evaluation
Related	4	3
Summary	Benefit 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.	Cost-utility analysis (CUA) is a form of economic evaluation that compares the costs of alternative interventions with their outcomes expressed in a common, preference-based measure of health — most often the quality-adjusted life year (QALY), or in global health the disability-adjusted life year (DALY). By combining length and quality of life into a single index, CUA allows interventions with very different effects to be compared on a like-for-like basis, and it produces an incremental cost-effectiveness ratio expressed as cost per QALY gained. It is the dominant method for informing decisions about which health technologies and programs to fund.