A New Role for Cost-Benefit Analysis in Canadian Transportation Infrastructure Investment

David Lewis () and Ian Currie ()

No 2016-02, CSLS Research Reports from Centre for the Study of Living Standards

Abstract: Encouraging greater reliance on Cost Benefit Analysis (CBA) as the organizing framework for facilitating discursive democratic procedures is an area in which the Canadian federal government can reinvigorate its role in the development of transportation infrastructure and physical infrastructure in general.The authors examine the microeconomic foundations of traditional CBA models. They find them too narrow to support the promise of CBA as a materially useful tool to help arrive at evidentiary consensus on major transportation infrastructure projects. To achieve its full promise, CBA requires an integration of advances in welfare economics, probability, discourse theory, and capability analysis.A framework for a reformulated CBA is presented along with an application of the approach in the case of gaining community evidentiary consensus on expansion of the Vancouver International Airport in the early 1990s. Potential implications for the federal government infrastructure policies today are explored and recommendations are made.

Keywords: Transportation; Investment; Infrastructure; Canada; Cost-Benefit Analysis (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D61 H54 N42 N72 N92 R42 R53 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2016-03
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-tre
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