Professor Alan Barrett:

I would certainly like to see more of the analysis, and a lot of people made this comment at the time. The national development plan includes a huge list of what certainly seem, on the face of it, to be very important infrastructural investments. It is very hard, however, to think in terms of prioritisation, without having seen the analysis that goes behind these sorts of things. On the two-to-one split, I do not know if the two-to-one split is correct or not. I would certainly have a concern. This is really a question for the Department of Public Expenditure and Reform and I would encourage the committee to ask it this question. When it does cost-benefit analyses of projects, which is the standard practice, there are a whole range of parameters that go into that when one is trying to work out what is a good project and when one is trying to rank these things. The critical variable when it comes to environmental issues is how one puts a value on, for example, greenhouse gas emission reductions that arise from certain investments. There seems to be a problem at the moment in some of the evaluations in that a rather low price of carbon is applied, whereby one is inherently devaluing the importance of the environmental good. It would certainly be fairly readily done to look at the parameters that are used in those evaluations. My suspicion is if one alters the shadow price of carbon in those analyses, one can get quite different rankings. In our opening statement, we talked about this and I did not want to say that the-----