Navigating CBA’s triple tradeoff

Two diagrams that illustrate why cost-benefit analysis alone may not provide a complete answer to a value-for-money question about a social investment, and two diagrams offering a solution.

Value for money (VfM) is sometimes assumed to be synonymous with cost-benefit analysis (CBA) - but VfM and CBA are not the same, and conflating them hinders our potential to make good resource allocation decisions. Value for money (good resource use) is something we can evaluate using various methods, including but not limited to CBA.

For decades, CBA h…