Michael Beesley and Cost Benefit Analysis

Michael Beesley made many important contributions to the development of Cost Benefit Analysis. The M1 was the first CBA in the UK which can claim to be economically satisfactory. The Victoria Line study was a further step to comprehensiveness and its second stage showed how practically important fares policy could be. In subsequent work he and others attempted to develop more satisfactory methods of using CBA, especially in an urban environment. His work on the valuation of time was pioneering, as was his work in establishing the economic and competitive significance of taxis. The unravelling of the related economic problems associated with subsidies, traffic restraint and road pricing was thorough and illuminating. By the end of his career Michael Beesley may not have fully reconciled his earlier adherence to CBA and the improvement of the public sector with his later Austrian beliefs; but the length of his experience, his creativity and imagination give him a phenomenal influence on the development of privatisation, regulation, and other aspects of economic liberalisation under the Thatcher government, so that he was not only one of the best but also one of the most influential applied economists of the second half of the 20th century in Britain, and among the greatest who applied himself to transport. © The London School of Economics and the University of Bath 2001