Where should governments spend your money? The impossible maths of political and moral decisions

By Renaud Foucart, Senior Lecturer in Economics, Lancaster University Management School, Lancaster University

Whenever the UK government decides to spend public money on a new project, it needs to weigh up the costs against the value of the benefits it hopes to achieve. And it’s rarely a simple calculation.

This is why Chancellor Rachel Reeves is changing the Treasury’s “green book” of rules which dictate how investment plans are made. Those rules, and the calculations they support, do not always work.

At one point for example, the benefit-cost ratio…

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