Massimo Florio
‐ Professor of Public Economics ‐
Fellow award at the SBCA 2026 Annual Conference
The award honors the outstanding contribution to cost-benefit analysis, the rigor of research, and its impact on European policy and international institutions.
MASSIMO FLORIO’S SPEECH
Good morning, everyone. It is a privilege to share a few reflections on where we stand, where we are heading, and what role our community can play.
On the current state of BCA
Benefit-cost analysis has never been more necessary — and yet, I would argue, it has also never been more contested. The greatest tension I see today is not methodological in the narrow sense. It is institutional. On one side, we have a mature, rigorous discipline, capable of estimating, in principle, shadow prices, distributional weights, social discount rates, and so on . On the other side, decision-makers increasingly operate under political urgency — pandemic response, climate transition and energy prices, geopolitical shocks — where the temptation is to bypass systematic appraisal altogether.
A second tension is epistemic. When I led the cost-benefit analysis of research infrastructures like CERN, or more recently the European Parliament studies on pharmaceutical R&D and COVID vaccine investments, the challenge was not just estimating some parameters. It was making visible what markets leave invisible: the social return on publicly funded knowledge. Standard BCA frameworks were not designed for the knowledge economy. But what is now more important?
On the future of BCA and SBCA
The opportunities are significant. For example, the green transition, the digitalisation of public services, biomedical research, and space exploration all require large-scale public investment decisions. These are precisely the domains where social cost-benefit analysis can make a difference — provided we move beyond GDP-centric metrics and take welfare effects and distributional outcomes seriously.
But there are real challenges. One is data. Linking decisions to long-run social outcomes requires longitudinal, granular, often cross-border data that institutions are not yet equipped to share. Another challenge is skills: the economics profession is producing too narrow training in public policy. We risk losing institutional memory.
On the role of SBCA
This is where the Society for Benefit-Cost Analysis has a distinctive responsibility. We are not just an academic club. We are a community that bridges research, policy, and practice. I would encourage SBCA to invest in three directions. First, build stronger bridges with international institution to support evidence-based policies and decisions. Second, develop guidance for frontier domains: research infrastructures, public health, and knowledge governance. Third, and perhaps most importantly, defend the independence of analysis. When BCA becomes advocacy dressed in numbers, it loses its authority.
We owe it to the next generation of practitioners to keep this discipline honest, ambitious, and genuinely public.
Thank you.
To know more:
https://www.benefitcostanalysis.org/;
Photo source: SBCA LinkedIn page
