ABSTRACT
Benefit cost analysis (BCA) emerged as a response to the idea that there should be some analysis of the benefits and costs of public investments— perhaps, a public sector counterpart of the feasibility studies which prudent private investors perform before undertaking long-term development projects. Before long, however, rather clear distinctions were developed between financial and economic-efficiency analysis, and between private and social concepts of efficiency. BCA clearly was oriented toward the economic rather than the financial and toward social rather than private concepts of efficiency. 1 The idea was to pretest public programs proposed for national economic development purposes to see whether they were in fact likely to make positive contributions to that goal. BCA was designed to evaluate proposed programs, identifying those which would move the national economy in the direction of social efficiency.
