Compare methods

	Benefit Incidence Analysis	Regulatory Impact Analysis
Field	Public Policy	Public Policy
Family	Process / pipeline	Process / pipeline
Year of origin	2000	1995
Originator	Public-finance and World Bank tradition; codified by Lionel Demery	Government regulatory-reform practice; standardised by the OECD
Type	Distributional analysis of public expenditure	Systematic ex-ante appraisal of proposed regulation
Seminal source	Demery, L. (2000). Benefit Incidence: A Practitioner's Guide. Washington, DC: World Bank, Poverty and Social Development Group, Africa Region.	OECD (2020). Regulatory Impact Assessment, OECD Best Practice Principles for Regulatory Policy. Paris: OECD Publishing.
Aliases	BIA, Benefit Incidence, Expenditure Incidence Analysis	RIA, Regulatory Impact Assessment, Impact Assessment of Regulation
Related	4	4
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.	Regulatory impact analysis (RIA) is a systematic process for appraising the likely costs, benefits and effects of proposed regulation before it is adopted. Promoted by the OECD as a cornerstone of good regulatory governance, it requires governments to define the problem a regulation is meant to solve, set out alternative options including non-regulatory ones, assess the impacts of each against a do-nothing baseline, consult affected parties, and recommend the option that delivers the greatest net benefit. RIA aims to ensure that new rules are evidence-based, proportionate and justified rather than imposed without examination of their consequences.