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Opportunity costs of environmental regulations (OCER) are an important consideration when governments make decisions on the formulation of environmental policies and when plants make decisions in response to environmental policies. Aimed at measuring OCER, the current paper proposes an approach in which the achievements of environmental control implemented by a production unit are considered. We quantify and define the achievements as "desirable" environmental outputs. In this way, for a production unit, producing normal desirable outputs and reaching environmental outputs is a tradeoff. OCER is measured by calculating a maximum amount of increasable normal outputs when production units do not need to produce any environmental outputs. Directional distance functions and data envelopment analysis (DEA) techniques are used to calculate OCER. The approach is applied to an empirical illustration based on Taiwan's port industry covering the period 2001–2007. It is found that the industry incurred opportunity costs due to environmental regulations equivalent to 1.8% of total revenue it creates. However, the OCER are significantly less than the economic losses due to productive inefficiency (PIE).

For most companies a key to survival in today's competitive market is to invest in new technologies. However, for many reasons such investments are difficult to justify by traditional economic analysis alone. One reason is the challenge of including the intangible and often hard to quantify costs and benefits associated with these investments. This is particularly true for new technologies due to the fact that there exits a lower level of corporate experience regarding the potential risks associated with a new technology compared to technologies that the company is familiar with. This situation points towards the need for an evaluation tool that complements classical economic analysis techniques with additional processes that consider these risks as well. The attempt here is to develop a process to help practitioners to consider the costs due to these risks through a systematic procedure based on their risk aversion traits.

Half the world is unbanked. The unbanked do not use any type of formal financial service at all. Why? What has kept the poor from opening formal bank accounts to save for retirement, from getting health insurance or loans to build new businesses? The assumption used to be that the poor lacked the resources and needs. In Chapter 2, though, we saw that the poor can and do use a wide array of financial services, but largely rely on informal means. If hundreds of millions of people want these services, why do not banks and insurance companies offer them? Why does nearly everyone in Finland, Singapore and Australia have bank accounts, but more than 95% of people in Turkmenistan, Niger and Cambodia do not?

In tourism, more than in any other sector, the investor in a big project is neither a company nor a tourism entrepreneur but the public sector. Indeed, many projects belong to the general tourism infrastructure, and the benefits do not only accrue to the paymaster, who may also consider their negative effects. In other words, externalities must be taken into account. This chapter focuses on five topics. First, it focuses on the nature of investment appraisal and explores the difference between micro and macro approaches. Secondly, attention is paid to externalities in tourism. The third section deals with the identification of cost and benefit items or the cost-benefit scheme, where Environmental costs are an important part of the scheme. In the same section, we proceed with the quantification and valuation of cost and benefit items and the calculation of the NPV and IRR. A fourth part of this chapter is focused on CBA versus economic impact analysis. In a last section, we illustrate the application of CBA in the tourism sector with a practical example.