A note on cost-effectiveness approaches to development with particular reference to industrialization in Malta

Abstract

IT may be said that cost-benefit analysis is, in some respects, as old as economic science, and in other respects, a new technique. It is a scientific tool which attempts to establish, from different economic standpoints, the relative efficiency of investments: The main aim of cost-benefit analysis is to act as a guide in the process of decision making. Essentially, in a macro-economic sense, it seeks to establish the costs or disadvantages, and the benefits or advantages, en- tailed by each of several alternative courses of action. Such courses of action could be different ways of channelling investment from government sources into productive sectors of the economy; or, as in the present con- text, the efficiency of a given mode of government investment carried out according to a specific blue-print of industrial development.