Compare methods

	Social Cost-Benefit Analysis for Development	Randomized Evaluation in Development
Field	Development Studies	Development Studies
Family	Process / pipeline	Process / pipeline
Year of origin	1974	2003
Originator	Ian Little & James Mirrlees (OECD/UNIDO appraisal traditions)	Esther Duflo, Abhijit Banerjee, Michael Kremer; J-PAL / IPA
Type	Economic project appraisal method	Experimental impact evaluation design
Seminal source	Little, I. M. D., & Mirrlees, J. A. (1974). Project Appraisal and Planning for Developing Countries. London: Heinemann / New York: Basic Books. ISBN: 9780465064106	Banerjee, A. V., & Duflo, E. (2009). The Experimental Approach to Development Economics. Annual Review of Economics, 1, 151–178.
Aliases	Social CBA, Economic Cost-Benefit Analysis, Project Economic Appraisal, Shadow-Price Cost-Benefit Analysis	Randomized Controlled Trials, Field Experiments in Development, RCTs in Development Economics, Randomized Field Trials
Related	4	4
Summary	Social cost-benefit analysis (social CBA) is the economic appraisal of development projects from the standpoint of society as a whole rather than the private investor. It values every input and output at its shadow (economic) price — the true opportunity cost or social worth, which in distorted developing-country markets diverges from observed market prices — then discounts the resulting net benefit stream at a social discount rate to compute an economic net present value (ENPV) and economic internal rate of return (EIRR). The method was systematised for developing countries by Ian Little and James Mirrlees and by the parallel UNIDO guidelines.	Randomized evaluation applies the logic of the controlled experiment to development policy: an intervention — a school grant, a deworming pill, an insurance product — is assigned at random to some units and withheld from others, so that any subsequent difference in outcomes can be attributed causally to the intervention rather than to confounding. Championed from the early 2000s by the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL) and Innovations for Poverty Action (IPA), the approach earned its leading proponents — Esther Duflo, Abhijit Banerjee, and Michael Kremer — the 2019 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics for transforming how anti-poverty programmes are tested.