Problems of a Comprehensive Assessment of the Socially Significant Investment Projects Amid a Pandemic

The pandemic crisis has highlighted the need to rethink the priorities of economic decision-making and fundamentally change the emphasis towards the principles of sustainable development. To assess even commercially viable investment projects, it is necessary to take into account their impact on long-term economic growth and social development. Appropriate methods for evaluating socially significant investment projects, along with financial estimates, require an assessment of the economic efficiency of investment projects, which are in line with the priorities of sustainable development. The paper proposes an integrated approach to the evaluation of socially significant investment projects using the case of the tourism industry, combining the private interests of the business with the public interests of expanding investment in projects with significant social effects. To do this, when comparing cash flows of financial and economic efficiency, flows associated with specific public effects, primarily social and tax ones, are identified. The proposed methods were tested for a real water park project in Russia. As a result of the calculations, a significant gap was revealed between relatively low financial efficiency along with high economic efficiency. The project was evaluated under various scenarios, including those with and without a pandemic. All calculation variants, taking into account the pandemic, show negative financial net present values for the project. However, even under the most pessimistic scenarios simulating the pandemic crisis, the level of economic efficiency remained positive, indicating greater opportunities for investment agents to adapt to adverse negative changes and the importance of social priorities in the context of sustainable development.