Review Of Some Operational Procedures To Incorporate Equity Objectives In Project Appraisal

In recent years there has been a growing interest in the development of methodologies related to the formulation and appraisal of projects. This is reflected in an increasing number of scientific papers and courses offered at different levels on the subject, most of which are directed for application in less developed countries. A wide variety of institutions are contributing in different ways to this development. Resulting from this interest, several operational procedures have been suggested which enable the analyst to perform financial as well as social appraisal of projects, where financial refers specifically to appraisal for the private and/or public participants in the project, and social refers to analysis from the perspective of economy-wide effects. The main objective of this paper is to review the most important operational procedures that have been suggested as a means to incorporate value judgements on income distribution in a systematic way into social cost benefit analysis. In fact, one of the main reasons that explain why methods to formally incorporate distribution concerns in project analysis are not a common practice, is a general lack of knowledge of those procedures which have been suggested and tried in case studies.