- What is the economic and social impact of environmental regulation?
- Which health treatments manage diabetes most effectively in the long run?
- What are the benefits from a library service and how might they be valued?
Local and central government face these sorts of questions every day. Scarce resources have to be allocated between competing demands. But often, there is a lack of good information with which to work.
PricewaterhouseCoopers has undertaken a wide range of assignments aimed at answering the questions above and many others like them. We have developed an approach for use by policy makers, regulators, funders and service providers which is designed to tackle many of the problems that typically arise in trying to answer these sorts of questions:
- Market-based estimates of value generally cannot be observed so proxy values must be identified and estimated
- Outcomes are often ill-defined or are very generic and high-level in nature
- Linkages between outputs and outcomes are not well understood
- Answers are required but time, resource and data limitations mean that in-depth and fresh research is either not possible or feasible.
Key features of our approach are that it:
- is based on a robust understanding of economic methodology and an up-to-date knowledge of social cost and benefit calculation
- provides a framework within which to input assumptions and economic relationships
- promotes transparency so that assumptions and relationships can be understood, enhanced, developed and also challenged
- results in estimates of social and economic impact based on real world experiences of stakeholders which are then tested
- is interactive, calibrates results first based on existing hard data and then tests the estimates of direct and indirect net benefits on a wider group of stakeholders.
