What’s at stake?
A short cost-benefit analysis of the USC elections BY PAOLO TAMASE
The University Student Council (USC) election is an annual spectacle that captures the attention of the entire community. At the beginning of every calendar year, students take a break from the monotony of academic life to listen to room-to-room campaigns, pour over flyers, attend forums (such as our very own
economic returns and outlays that are required by the project. Furthermore, if the project is a societal activity, such as our USC elections, the benefits and costs to society must be considered.
UPfront), and on a single, fateful day, cast their votes. But is all of this necessary? What separates economists from other social scientists is our obsession with efficiency; this involves cutting-off any practice whose costs exceed the value derived. And so, at least in this article, we put our own USC elections up the pedestal and assess it as if we were deciding on its fate, using an important economic tool.
be undertaken if the resulting difference between benefits and costs—the Net Present Value (NPV)—is positive, i.e. it will net a return on the funds invested. A real CBA would involve an estimation of the financial equivalents of economic benefits and costs in order to arrive at the most informative NPV possible; however, we do not have the luxury of time and space to conduct a rigorous analysis, and so we proceed with a very crude version of a CBA, where we simply list the most relevant economic costs and benefits of the USC elections, and use a qualitative understanding to net the two factors.
In a nutshell, a Cost-Benefit Analysis (CBA) is a process where the present value of a project’s total benefits is matched against the present value of its total costs. Benefits and costs refer not only to financial figures, but to total economic value, including externalities. Also, in evaluating the project, we include all future
If the project in question has no alternatives, it can
The explicit economic costs of the elections are numerous. On the part of the university, there are the (taxpayer-provided) funds spent for electionday expenses and university personnel man-hours 45