Accounting for Income and Population Dynamics in Benefit-Cost Analysis: An Application to Dam Removal
摘要
Economists have long recognized that as incomes rise, values of ecosystem services will also rise relative to prices for market goods. Nevertheless, standard practices in benefit-cost analysis holds prices fixed over time, thereby creating a substantial bias against the environment. Recent contributions to theory and practice offer a practical framework for correcting this bias, including a simple rule for estimating future relative price changes for ecosystem services. However, equally important to future values of ecosystem service is the effect of population change. A rising population means that the value of both rival and non-rival ecosystem services will likely increase; and when both population and incomes are rising, the effects on ecosystem service values are compounded. The importance of correcting these biases is illustrated with the example of a long-proposed project to breach four dams on the Snake River in Washington State. A 1999 federally-mandated study without these bias corrections estimated an NPV for dam breaching of -$1.4B. When the impact of rising incomes on relative prices are accounted for, the NPV rises by $2.9B; and when both rising incomes and population are accounted for, the NPV rises by $6.5B. Strikingly, when the analysis is updated to 2023 and bias-corrected, the NPV is nearly $50B.