12 Economic evaluation

This chapter considers the economic evaluation of interventions concerned with the contamination of recreational and other waters by microbial pollution from livestock waste. The objective of such interventions is to reduce adverse impacts on water quality and public health. Because resources are scarce, regulatory choices imply trade-offs between the resources needed to manage the problem of water contamination, and other potentially competing uses of those resources. It is important that resources are used as efficiently as possible in the sense that society should make the most of the resources available by comparing what is gained from using those resources with the gain from alternative uses – the so-called opportunity costs. Economic evaluation is thus about determining whether an intervention is an efficient use of society’s resources and can be defined as the comparative analysis of alternative courses of action in terms of both their costs and consequences (Drummond et al. 1987). The tasks included