Impact Blogs: Limestone Analytics Announces Public Release of Unified Cost-Benefit Analysis (UCBA) Guidelines

We are thrilled to announce the publication of the Unified Cost-Benefit Analysis (UCBA) Guidelines, a landmark document developed to standardize how cost-effectiveness and cost-benefit analyses (CEAs and CBAs) are documented and presented. Prepared by Limestone Analytics and led by Bahman Kashi and Rachel Bahn, this comprehensive guide aims to make CEAs and CBAs more accessible, reliable, and impactful for decision-makers across sectors.

What Are the UCBA Guidelines?

The UCBA Guidelines introduce a standardized approach to specifying and documenting CEA and CBA models. Unlike traditional approaches that vary widely in structure and transparency, UCBA provides a consistent framework for practitioners to present their work logically, rigorously, and efficiently. Think of it as the blueprint for economic analysis, much like architectural blueprints or standardized financial statements are for their respective fields. With a decade of iterative development and feedback from experts in the field, these UCBA Guidelines improve the practice of CEA and CBA by:

How?

UCBA changes the workflow by introducing the model’s specification as the core of the process and leaving the implementation of the model as an output. This concept is illustrated below.

Why Does This Matter to the Sector?

The value of the UCBA Guidelines extends beyond the technical realm of economic analysis. By improving transparency, accuracy, and efficiency, UCBA helps decision-makers:

1. Enhance Decision-Making Across Sectors: While many public and private can benefit from more evidence-based decision-making, CBA’s application remains limited to large-scale investments and policies. UCBA reduces the cost of conducting CBAs and CEAs while increasing their quality, allowing governments, corporations, NGOs, and other organizations to more effectively evaluate investments and policies across various sectors, enabling evidence-based decisions that consider broader societal impacts.
2. Drive Accountability: Clear documentation and methodologies ensure stakeholders can trust and verify results.
3. Enable Innovation: UCBA’s flexible yet robust framework allows practitioners to consistently and comprehensively document analyses that allow for the integration of emerging technologies like machine learning and artificial intelligence into the analytical process.

A Paradigm Shift in Economic Analysis

UCBA introduces a paradigm shift. The UCBA Guidelines propose a shift from a tool-specific approach to a flexible yet comprehensive documentation paradigm, helping practitioners throughout the conceptualization, development, and maintenance of CEA and CBA models by:

• Following a common standardized model specification language, eliminating the need for team members and peer-reviewers to reverse engineer the model to understand the methodology and assumptions behind the results.
• Maintaining logical integrity, e.g., easily finding cases of redundancies in calculations and inputs.
• Ensuring compliance with global best practices, making analyses verifiable, transparent, and credible.

What’s Next?

To date, Limestone Analytics has used UCBA to document the methods and assumptions of more than 50 economic analyses for a range of clients including the U.S. Department of State, Millennium Challenge Corporation (MCC), and the World Health Organization (WHO). Limestone’s clients value the transparency, consistency, efficiency, and quality that UCBA brings into applied economic analysis. As UCBA adoption grows, we anticipate its impact on improving decision-making processes, reducing inefficiencies, and enabling more equitable outcomes across diverse sectors.

We invite you to explore the UCBA Guidelines and join us in transforming how we evaluate policies and investments. Download your copy today and be part of this exciting journey toward better decision-making through unified, transparent, and impactful cost-benefit analysis.