Together with colleagues Mark Freeman  (York) (linked on site), Moritz Drupp (Hamburg) (linked on site), Peter Howard (NYU) and Deborah Lucas (MIT Sloan), Ben Groom presented to an expert audience on the issue of social discounting for Cost Benefit Analysis for the Society of Benefit Cost Analysis. The workshop was led by Pr Freeman and Pr Lisa Robinson (Harvard) and consisted of an overview of the topic and recent updates to the US A4 and A94 guidance on public expenditure and cost-benefit analysis, which has recently undergone many changes in relation to social discounting and the evaluation of inequality. Pr. Lucas provided an overview of the arguments for using market based social discount rates, especially in accounting for risk. Pr Groom presented the UK Treasury’s approach to social discounting which is a more normative approach using the Ramsey Rule, as well as arguments for using a declining discount rate. Pr. Howard presented on the recent updates to the A4 and A94 in the US, both on the legal processes that these changes had to go through, and the technical detail on how the Social Discount Rate has changed in rationale and level, and in its explicit handling of risk. Pr. Drupp then expanded the analysis to show how nonmarketed and increasingly scarce ecosystem services ought to be discounted, and how secular changes in inequality can also be embodied in the discount rate to better reflect welfare. Details of the workshop can be found here: SBCA workshops and here: SBCA Discounting Workshop

The workshop was provided pro bono for the SBCA, a society of which Pr. Groom is a member and for whom he undertook a keynote at the SBCA European conference last year in Milan (SBCA 2023 already linked in the website actually).