ABSTRACT
In this chapter we present a much more sophisticated and ‘user friendly’ development of the Belgian Model, which was designed to be used by policy makers and planners in Sénégal. It is an integrated modelling framework which is based on the ideas developed earlier, but including environmental effects. It was financed by the Directorate General VIII of the European Commission, as a tool for decision support for development policies and projects in developing countries, both for use by the Commission and also for use within the countries themselves. It is seen as an alternative to macroeconomic and project based evaluations for development initiatives presently used by international funding agencies. The framework allows the evaluation of the longer term, broad consequences and changes brought about by a decision or policy. While estimates of economic cost and benefit can be adequate for certain problems of restricted scope, they can provide quite incorrect guidelines for the long term. Improved information systems, and higher technology have combined to exacerbate rather than improve the problem, since narrow economic ‘optimization’ can be carried out more thoroughly. And this merely serves to push many of the costs into ‘externalities’, as economists refer to them. And, ‘externalities’ are everything that is outside the restricted set of factors actually included in the assessment, so that the natural and social environment, technological change and the future of the whole system itself, are simply excluded from the calculation.
