An inconsistency in the European Union Guidelines for Cost-Benefit Analysis of investment projects

Jérôme Massiani

No 470, Working Papers from University of Milano-Bicocca, Department of Economics

Abstract: European Union Guidelines have been for long the cornerstone of the evaluation of European funding for projects. An important aspect of this method is the general exclusion of taxation from computation. We argue that when applied on projects that shift demand from a highly taxed mode to a slightly less taxed one, the modus operandi described by the guidelines and used by analysts in documented papers, actually violates the principle of net of taxes computation. In most cases this inconsistency will be hardly visible to the analyst. However, when the procedure deals with projects where mode shift is important, in absolute or relative terms, the inconsistency will create important distortions in the results.

Keywords: Cost-Benefit Analysis; European Union Guidelines; fuel duties; taxation; rail project; multimodal evaluation. (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 11
Date: 2021-06
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-ppm
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
http://repec.dems.unimib.it/repec/pdf/mibwpaper470.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:mib:wpaper:470

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers from University of Milano-Bicocca, Department of Economics Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Matteo Pelagatti ().