Study of Economic Evaluation Procedures for Population-Related Projects

摘要

This report reviews the problems involved with the lack of clearly quantifiable benefits that make economic evaluation of population-related projects (PRP's) difficult. Discussion is given in turn to: (1) PRP's macroeconomic benefits (increases in per capita income and consumption) and microeconomic benefits (enabling individuals and societies to meet fertility goals); (2) PRP's direct outputs (provision of contraceptive services and efficient use of them) and indirect outputs (activities to provide knowledge of contraception and/or effect attitudinal changes towards it); (3) methods to evaluate the impact of these outputs on fertility reduction, including short-cut methods such as the couple-years of protection (CYP) method and more detailed analytical methods (none of which are wholly precise); (4) the need to distinguish short and long-term PRP benefits given the limited 3-5 year time-frame of most PRP's; and (5) the impact of projects having only indirect and long-term, but nevertheless real fertility effects, e.g., land reform projects.