Month: November 2013

The Economist recently noted that: "The Asian Development Bank advocates “stress tests” for vulnerable places rather like stress tests on financial institutions." We had been suggesting the same. We are grateful to The Economist newspaper for pointing us to the Asian...

The world is in the midst of a shift towards a low carbon economy. Scientists almost unanimously agree that this shift must take place, and the stakes seem to be getting higher. Rising sea levels, more extreme weather events, flooding, population displacement,...

“How do you value …?” My job, as Impact Infrastructure's Chief Economist is to put a price on the difficult to price: the value of a walk in the woods, the benefit of green space in a city. “How do you value …?” is usually the first question people ask me when I tell...

The Economist (http://www.economist.com/node/21560838) on August 25th 2012 wrote about NEON, the National Ecological Observatory Network and how “America’s National Science Foundation managed to persuade Congress to earmark $434m ... to set it up. The operating budget...

What`s the Internet infrastructure worth to the U.S.? My best guess of the value of the Internet infrastructure to the U.S.: $174 billion/year (with a 90% confidence interval of $44-264 billion). Why so precise/imprecise? Read on. I heard a Freakonomics pod cast...

The Right Tool For The Right Job – Cheap, Responsive, and Realistic I recently wrote a rather cynical post (Decisions, Decisions) about how economists and cost-benefit analysis (CBA) were useful, but too expensive to be used enough in infrastructure projects. Often...

Summon the Economists Usually once, perhaps twice, rarely three times in the long sequence of events that is a major infrastructure project, the readers of cost-benefit entrails are summoned. Go/No-Go? Sometimes the economists are summoned when a justification is...