Course Description
Cost-benefit analysis is a vital part of any large-scale project, allowing an assessment of the financial, social and economic impact caused. This training course provides the opportunity to learn everything you will need to carry out effective cost-benefit analyses in the transport industry, the risk and uncertainty involved, and how to handle the various different types of information available. The skills you will gain will allow the administration of more accurate and reflective cost-benefit analyses through improved methods and processes applicable to transport economics.
What Do Participants Learn?
- A formal understating of the key principles of cost-benefit analysis in the transport industry
- Methods for quantifying costs and benefits
- Expertise in dealing with risk and uncertainty
- A practical example of building a cost benefit model in the transport industry
- Exploration of the value of non-market impacts
Who Should Attend?
- Project design specialists
- Economists
- Technical and business professionals who are expected to use and present credible cost-benefit analyses to make and defend their choices
What Will the Learning Experience Include?
Phase: 1
Introduce
- Comprehensive pre-program activities include:
- Web-based information forms & surveys completed by attendee.
- Direct consultation with the attendee about the expectations.
- During the training, participants engage in data, activities, and conversations that lead to insight and knowledge.
- Participants learn from expert trainers who have both academic and business experiences.
- Highly applicable training content & instructive activities for adding depth to training topics.
- **A half-day site visit for integrating the experience & plan next steps. Opportunities to provide connections, ideas & support.
Phase: 2
Explore & Practice
Phase: 3
Apply
- Apply & sustain the learning experience by using this ongoing support:
- To ensure participant has new skills or behavior progress.
- Optional, fee-based mentoring & coaching with the trainer.
- Training materials & additional documents (e-books, pdf files, presentations and articles)
- Evaluate your training experience by giving us feedbacks and help us to reach our organizational goals.
- Participant's Evaluation
- Trainer's Evaluation
Phase: 4
EVALUATE
Section 1: Introduction to cost-benefit analysis
- Aim of cost-benefit analysis
- Importance to policy-makers and link to Impact Assessment
- Importance to regulated utilities and infrastructure investment
- Ex ante and ex post cost-benefit analysis
- Guidance documents (including Treasury Green Book)
Section 2: Basic issues in cost-benefit analysis
- Defining the baseline
- Identifying costs and benefits
- Transfers and distributional impacts
- Using market prices to value impacts
- Taking account of inflation and relative price changes
- Discounting
- How to discount future impacts
- What discount rate to use
Section 3: How to deal with risk and uncertainty
- The importance of thinking about risk and uncertainty
- Scenario and sensitivity analysis
- Monte Carlo analysis
- Real options
Section 4 : In more detail: how to quantify costs and benefits
- Challenges in quantifying costs and benefits
- Methods of collecting data and analysing impacts
- Stakeholder engagement
- Market research
- Behavioural experiments
- Statistical analysis
- Case studies
- Modelling
- Assessing the additionality of impacts
- Adjusting for optimism bias
Section 5: How to value non-market impacts
- Why non-market impacts are important
- Techniques for valuing non-market impacts
- Using existing valuations
- Stated preference
- Revealed preference
- Examples of how to value non-market impacts
- Time savings
- Carbon impacts
- Other environmental impacts (e.g. noise, amenity)
- Health impacts
- Safety impacts