Is There a Role for Benefit-Cost Analysis in Environmental, Health, and Safety Regulation?

Benefit-cost analysis has a potentially important role to play in helping inform regulatory decision-making, although it should not be the sole basis for such decision-making. This paper offers eight principles on the appropriate use of benefit-cost analysis.Environment, Health and Safety, Regulatory Reform

Benefit-Cost Analysis in Environmental, Health, and Safety Regulation: A Statement of Principles

Benefit-cost analysis can play a very important role in legislative and regulatory policy debates on improving the environment, health, and safety. It can help illustrate the tradeoffs that are inherent in public policymaking as well as make those tradeoffs more transparent. It can also help agencies set regulatory priorities. Benefit-cost analysis should be used to help decisionmakers reach a decision. Contrary to the views of some, benefit-cost analysis is neither necessary nor sufficient for designing sensible public policy. If properly done, it can be very helpful to agencies in the decisionmaking process. Decisionmakers should not be precluded from considering the economic benefits and costs of different policies in the development of regulations. Laws that prohibit costs or other factors from being considered in administrative decisionmaking are inimical to good public policy. Currently, several of the most important regulatory statutes have been interpreted to imply such prohibitions. Benefit-cost analysis should be required for all major regulatory decisions, but agency heads should not be bound by a strict benefit-cost test. Instead, they should be required to consider available benefit-cost analyses and to justify the reasons for their decision in the event that the expected costs of a regulation far exceed the expected benefits. Agencies should be encouraged to use economic analysis to help set regulatory priorities. Economic analyses prepared in support of particularly important decisions should be subjected to peer review both inside and outside government. Benefits and costs of proposed major regulations should be quantified wherever possible. Best estimates should be presented along with a description of the uncertainties. Not all benefits or costs can be easily quantified, much less translated into dollar terms. Nevertheless, even qualitative descriptions of the pros and cons associated with a contemplated action can be helpful. Care should be taken to ensure that quantitative factors do not dominate important qualitative factors in decisionmaking. The Office of Management and Budget, or some other coordinating agency, should establish guidelines that agencies should follow in conducting benefit-cost analyses. Those guidelines should specify default values for the discount rate and certain types of benefits and costs, such as the value of a small reduction in mortality risk. In addition, agencies should present their results using a standard format, which summarizes the key results and highlights major uncertainties.

Framing in educational practices. Learning activity, digital technology and the logic of situated action

An overarching ambition of this thesis is to study the in situ practices that emerge when technology becomes part of educational activities and, in addition, to examine what students’ definition of such activities will be. By analysing students’ concrete uses of digital technology in regular classroom practices, the study intends to demystify how digital technology codetermines activities in educational settings. A background of this interest is that there are many different claims in the literature and in the public debate regarding what learning will be like when such tools are used. Accordingly, the use of digital technologies is in this thesis studied from the perspective of student activities and rationalities. Analytically, this is done within a sociocultural perspective and, in addition, with the help of the conceptual distinctions of frame analysis. Empirical material have been collected via video recordings of secondary school students’ engaging in solving word problems in mathematics presented by means of educational software. The analyses aim at scrutinizing what the presence of educational software in mathematics implies for the students’ learning practices in situations when they encounter some kind of difficulty in their problem solving. The results, presented in three studies, show that for long periods of time the students’ interaction involved not only the contents but also different functionalities and design qualities of the digital technology. The findings in this study thus point to the need to question the alleged benefits that surround the implementation of digital technologies. According to the empirical findings in the three studies presented in this thesis, along with knowledge from previous research, digital technology cannot be said to improve learning in any linear sense. Instead, educational activities involving the use of digital technologies imply a different way of learning with new possibilities and new problems; a different pedagogical situation and a different relation between the students and the contents

Is There a Role for Benefit-Cost Analysis in Environmental, Health, and Safety Regulation?

The growing impact of regulations on the economy has led both Congress and the Administration to search for new ways of reforming the regulatory process. Many of these initiatives call for greater reliance on the use of economic analysis in the development and evaluation of regulations One specific approach being advocated is benefit- cost analysis, an economic tool for comparing the desirable and undesirable impacts of proposed policies.</p