Yet the costs may outweigh the benefits.

But potentially significant costs offset these small benefits.

The costs are evident, they argue, but what are the benefits?

Benefits were translated as gains from cost reductions.

Studies show that benefits are higher than the costs.

Benefits are estimated to end up about six times higher than the costs.

The benefits have become more dubious, while the costs and risks have grown increasingly evident.

Thus, the immediate benefits become more politically salient than potential future costs.

Thus, the benefits are between four and 6.8 times greater than the cost.

The costs would also come much sooner than the benefits and persist much longer.

The benefits of higher recycling rates would surely offset the associated administrative costs.

For each issue examined, we focused on benefits relative to costs. To guide our thinking, we asked ourselves if we had, say, an extra 75 billion to spend, where could we achieve the most good?

Cost benefit analysis balancing the cost of remedial action against the benefit of avoiding disaster is no longer permissible.

It involves comparing the total expected cost of each option against the total expected benefits, to see whether the benefits outweigh the costs, and by how much.

Yet the overall benefits of a successful Doha Round would likely be hundreds of times greater than these costs.

Fiscal expansion is always risky, as it adds to debt and raises dangers later. But, given where we are, the benefits exceed the costs in countries with sustainable debt.

Yet the benefits of a successful Doha round are between 45 and 440 times higher than these costs.

Benefits from power generation, downstream irrigation, carbon offsets, and reduced floods would be worth roughly twice as much.

g Earmarked for a project entitled, Cost Benefit Analysis of Small Arms and Light Weapons Destruction.

Indeed, the irony is that the social benefits of such subsidies are enormous, while the costs are negligible.

Using the Danish figures to calculate EU wide costs, the total is likely to be more than 150 billion annually, with every euro doing just half a cent worth of good.

That experience showed that countries default when the costs are lower than the benefits.

The economic benefits, estimated to be between five and nineteen times higher than the costs, are dramatic.

Rather than carefully balancing the benefits of each government expenditure program with the costs of raising taxes to finance those benefits, the right seeks to use a sledgehammer not allowing the national debt to increase forces expenditures to be limited to taxes.

To put it in economics jargon, efficiency requires equating the marginal cost associated with allocation (both in acquiring information about the relative benefits of different projects and in monitoring investments) with the marginal benefits.

We do no such thing, because we recognize that the costs of high speed cars must be weighed against the benefits of a mobile society.

The social benefits of Myriad s slightly earlier discovery have been dwarfed by the costs that its callous pursuit of profit has imposed.

This situation often makes it difficult to convince the decision makers to engage in reform, even though benefits are likely to outweigh costs.

However, such incentives do not address the problem of low quality education, and research shows that the benefits do not always outweigh the costs.

The incremental cost effectiveness ratio (ICER) is the ratio between the difference in costs and the difference in benefits of two interventions.

But, while this implies that the benefits of conservation outstrip the costs by an extraordinary margin, the calculations have been widely criticized.

The costs add up to just 0.50 per household, while the benefits from improved health and saved time in many developing countries are worth 1.20.

With the benefits exceeding the costs by between 10 and 25 times, this seems to be a sound option.

Indeed, Iran s leaders, weighing the costs and benefits, have plenty of good reasons not to cross that red line.

They may please farmers and other interest groups, but overall they simply drive up costs and reduce already minimal benefits.

A number of major donors believe that the discipline of loan repayment sharpens the focus on the costs benefits of prospective projects, and provides an incentive to ensure that funds are used effectively.

For example, if the wetland were to be destroyed to make way for a new district, we know that its benefits would have to be at least 1.75 million higher than the costs.

Stopping temperatures from rising by more than 2 C would require draconian, instant emission reductions for the OECD the reductions would have to be between 40 50 below their expected path in just 12 years. Even if political consensus could be found, the cost would be phenomenal one model estimates that the total global cost would be around 84 trillion, while the economic benefits would amount to just a seventh of this amount.

A social cost benefit analysis (taking into account impacts other than on the budget) makes such expenditures, even when debt financed, even more attractive.

But, while we often assume that the benefits of improving water and sanitation systems always outweigh the costs, this is not always true.

Second, immediate carbon cuts are expensive and the cost significantly outweighs the benefits. If the Kyoto agreement had been fully implemented throughout this century, it would have cut temperatures only by an insignificant 0.2 C (0.3 F), at a cost of 180 billion every year.

Also, substantial savings can be made by avoiding unnecessary costs such as overpayments to creditors or penalty interests due to poor bookkeeping.

The report also called for water spray systems to fill up draining pools, but made this conditional on a cost benefit analysis conducted by each plant.

Using a more realistic approach, and including monitoring and administration costs, the outlay for governments will still be less than half of the economic benefits.

Even accounting for the costs to short term losers (say, particular industries or workers with certain skills), the overall long term benefits can be large.