Coastal Services Center

Socioeconomic Factors

Economists have developed tools like Benefit-Cost Analysis for organizing information on the relative value of public investments like beach nourishment projects. When the value of all significant benefits and costs can be expressed in monetary terms, such tools can be used to compute the net value (benefits minus costs) of the alternatives under consideration, and to identify the alternative that yields the greatest increase in public welfare. The overall economic efficiency of proposed actions is an important social goal. Equity and justice are two others. For this reason, traditional BCA or alternative tools for assessing efficiency should not be used without also considering such factors as the distributional effects of proposed actions (who pays vs. who benefits). This component of the Web site describes a wide variety of important social and economic factors that should be taken into account when considering a beach nourishment project.