costibenefici

Costibenefici is a term used in policy analysis to describe a decision-making framework that weighs costs against benefits to guide investment and policy choices. The concept emphasizes identifying and quantifying costs (such as capital outlays, operating expenses, environmental impacts) and benefits (such as revenue, efficiency gains, health improvements, social welfare) over a defined time horizon, typically with a discount rate to compare present values.

In practice, costibenefici is closely related to cost-benefit analysis (CBA). The term is mainly encountered in Italian-language policy discourse as an informal shorthand for the standard CBA approach and is not a formal, universally agreed-upon methodology. Proponents stress the structured comparison it provides; critics note challenges in valuing non-market effects and potential biases in monetization.

Methodology typically involves several steps: identify relevant costs and benefits; quantify them, when possible, and assign monetary values; select a time horizon; discount future values; calculate net present value and/or benefit-cost ratio; conduct sensitivity analyses; and report distributional effects and uncertainty. Analysts may also assess non-monetary impacts and ethical considerations.

Applications and limitations: costibenefici is used across public infrastructure, environmental regulation, healthcare, and technology deployment. Limitations include the difficulty of capturing non-monetary or ethical factors, potential misrepresentation of benefits, and overreliance on monetization. To address these issues, some practitioners supplement costibenefici with multi-criteria decision analysis to incorporate qualitative factors.