One of the purposes of public decision-making is to promote the welfare of society as a whole as well as the welfare levels of individual members of society. Cost-benefit analysis (CBA) is the principal analytical framework used to evaluate public expenditure decisions. This procedure rests on the assumption that an efficient alternative should be selected that maximizes the net aggregate benefits to society as a whole. However,this selection results in projects that invariably provide different levels of benefits to members of a community, thus contravening the principles of equity or distributive justice. The major objective of this paper is to explore and examine various strategies of dealing with this problem of distributing net benefits to the public through impartial reasoning, once the CBAs for the various highway alternatives have been done. Six theories of distributive justice are examined, and then these theories are applied in a common setting to a highway project, where several efficient alternatives have been proposed. While this research is not prompted by the desire to proclaim a winner from among the various theories of justice described, it is evident that some of these theories make heroic attempts to reduce inequity as opposed to others. (A)
Samenvatting