Distributional effects of agricultural productivity in benefit cost analysis: alternative weighting of benefits and costs

This paper proposes a methodology to weight benefit/cost analysis in a way that increases the policy focus on food insecure households. Such a weighting may be important to policy makers such as the Consulting Group for International Agricultural Research who must choose between research and development alternatives in developing countries. Specifically, the weights can be set to emphasize the needs of low-resource households and smallholder agriculture.