Guidelines for Benefit‐Cost Analysis

The final Reference Case Guidelines for Benefit-Cost Analysis in Global Health and Development are now available.

Read our special issue of the Journal of Benefit-Cost Analysis.

Download our full set of methods papers and case studies.

Investing in global health and development requires making difficult choices about what initiatives to fund and what level of resources to devote to each initiative. Benefit‐cost analysis supports these decisions by evaluating the consequences of alternative investments. However, real differences in these consequences can be obscured by differences in analytic methods and assumptions, potentially leading to widely varying conclusions regarding the desirability of particular programs or policies.

This project, funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, involves developing guidelines to encourage the conduct of high quality benefit‐cost analyses. These guidelines provide a reference case that promotes comparability across analyses, and include principles, methodological specifications, and reporting standards. The guidelines build on the existing iDSI reference case, which discusses the general framework for economic evaluation and the conduct of cost-effectiveness analyses.