On Balance: Review of "Cost Benefit Analysis" by Per Olov Johansson and Bengt Kristrom
Cambridge Elements has created a series on Public Economics, edited by Robin Boadway, Frank Cowell and Massimo Florio. This is part of a major project by Cambridge University Press, which is intended to provide peer-reviewed analytical surveys and frontier topics in all the disciplines. We happily note that the first published “Element” in this series is Cost Benefit Analysis, by Per-Olov Johansson and Bengt Kriström (2018). Cost-Benefit Analysis is available as a free download for a limited time, and is for sale (relatively inexpensively) in print at Cambridge and at online booksellers, such as Barnes and Noble. The Element is just above eighty pages (plus a short technical annex and a long list of references).
Encompassing the whole of Cost-Benefit Analysis in such a reduced volume is a tour de force, as acknowledged by the authors in the prologue. The aim is to provide a comprehensive and non-technical state of the art overview of Cost-Benefit Analysis, including both basic classical results and some new frontiers. It has been successfully reached.
The authors’ task is made easier by a book they co-authored in 2015, Cost Benefit Analysis for Project Appraisal, which was about three times as long as the Element. While of course the authors build on this source, the Element has several differentiating features.