ABSTRACT
There are a number of problems in connection with public cost-benefit analysis - the pricing of ‘intangibles’, the treatment of uncertainty and alternative methods of discounting come to mind in this connection - that have not as yet been satisfactorily resolved. There is, in addition, a problem that, so far as I know, has not been explicitly recognised and satisfactorily treated: namely, the propriety of using a conventional discounting (or compounding) procedure when the stream of benefits is expected to cover a period over which beneficiaries expire and are born.
