Economic appraisal

Approach to Equilibrium As equilibrium is approached the rate of reaction falls off, and the reactor size requireci to achieve a specified conversion goes up. At some point, the cost of increased reactor size will outweigh the cost of discarded or recycled unconverted material. No simple rule for an economic appraisal is really possible, but sometimes a basis of 95 percent of equilibrium conver-... 

Health economics is the application of the discipline of economics to the topic of health. When viewed in this light, health economics becomes first and foremost a way of thinking based on the principles of scarcity and the need for choice. Although the techniques of economic appraisal (to be discussed later in this chapter) are the principal ways in which the discipline is applied, they are merely the toolkit. The use of these tools without a proper understanding of the principles upon which they are based can be both ineffective and misleading. ... 

The most extreme way of ensuring that economic evaluations are undertaken and that the results affect service delivery is to make economic appraisal a compulsory part of the process of... 

For historical perspective, this scientific, technical and economic appraisal of... 

Drummond MF. Principles of economic appraisal in health care. New York (NY) Oxford University Press 1980. 

Briggs AH, Bousquet J, Wallace MV, Busse WW, Clark TJ, Pedersen SE, Bateman ED. GOAL Investigators Group. Cost-effectiveness of asthma control an economic appraisal of the GOAL study. Allergy 2006 61(5) 531-6. 

Gain, as well as loss or harm, is thus associated with risk. This leads some to define risk in a neutral way as the possibility of more than one outcome occurring where those possible outcomes may be more as well as less desirable than the expected one (UK Treasury guidance on economic appraisal, quoted in RCEP, 1998, p51). 

Murphy, M.C. 1975. An Economic Appraisal of Organic Farming Systems. Department of Land Economy, Cambridge. 

Figure 4 presents the results of the economic appraisal on relative terms. On this basis the competitiveness of each pipeline route can be estimated. 

The economic appraisal process is usually concerned with a large project, not necessarily physically large (although that is normally the case), but certainly large in respect to the sums of money required for its design and construction - sums of money that may exceed those readily available within the company for that investment. The project is also long in terms of its construction period and operating lifetime, and it is this extended lifetime that is the prime reason for the appraisal. 

It is, of course, possible to add up all of the revenues over the project s lifetime and to compare this sum with the total investments. If the revenues exceed the costs, then the project is apparently profitable, but if the reverse is true, it is not profitable and no manipulative techniques will be able to make it so. The comparison of costs and revenues, in an appropriate fashion, is the target of economic appraisal, and its first problem is to deal with the time value of money. 

It is this change in the value of money with time that complicates an economic appraisal - how is a pound spent at the start of construction to be compared fairly with a pound earned perhaps 15 years later How this is done is the key to the appraisal process, and is explained later in this chapter. 

It is normal, in undertaking an economic appraisal, to ignore the effects of inflation - which applies both to costs and revenues (assuming that prices rise roughly to keep pace with inflation). If inflation is included in the calculation, then a slightly higher value will normally found for the IRR, so that its exclusion presents a slightly less favourable case. 

A technical and economic appraisal of petrochemicals spans several large subject areas petroleum and oil industry economics, petrochemical refining and applied chemistry, chemical engineering and process economics. Unfortunately these distinct fields carry their own units. The petroleum industry generally uses American units based on standards defined at 60° Fahrenheit and are generally the units used in the US chemicals industry. Most chemists and academic engineers use... 

The most extreme way of ensuring that economic evaluations are undertaken and that the results affect service delivery is to make economic appraisal a compulsory part of the process of getting the intervention approved for practice. Several countries have made attempts to achieve this objective, with varying degrees of success. These countries include Australia, Canada, The Netherlands and the UK. For the purposes of this chapter we have chosen to focus on the approaches of the home countries of the two authors, namely Canada and the UK. 

The results of an economic evaluation are reviewed together with other relevant aspects, such as, competition and likely product life in arriving at project investment decisions. The decisions are essential in order to both plan and allocate the long-term use of available resources. The objectives of an economic appraisal are ... 

In the previous chapter we have seen how an economic appraisal of a chcsniical process has been made. This was termed a preconstruction economic analysis at the process development level. The cost and profit figures were pre.sented to management with fairly reliable costs on equipment and building requirements. An estimate on site development costs vas included with no specific reference to the exact geographical location of the chemical plant. 

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