Non-Environmental Cost-Benefit News

The estimated runningcost of a new national identity card scheme has risenagain to £5.8bn over10 years-a 5.5 per cent increase since the previous cost-benefit analysis by the Home Office six months ago.

The increase means that the estimated unit cost of each card has risen from £88 to £93, although the fee charged to the public has not yet been decided. It is likely to be lower for some less well-off groups.

On top of the running costs, there will be an additional bill for setting up the scheme, which the Home Office has refused to estimate on grounds of "commercial sensitivity".

In November the department estimated that the scheme - including new passports with biometric identifiers that will be required for travel to the US - would cost £5.5bn over 10 years. The government's original estimate, made in late 2002, was £3bn.

Results from a government-sponsored trial of biometrics, also released yesterday, showed that iris scan technology was generally effective, but less successful with black people and those aged over 59.

The findings raised fresh questions about the cost-effectiveness of the controversial plan, as ministers launched a new offensive to get the identity card bill through parliament following its defeat before the general election.

The Conservatives said last night they intended to vote against the bill, a move that makes the legislation the first clear test of Tony Blair's authority in the new parliament.

Because of Labour's much-reduced majority, the Tory opposition means that the prime minister will need to work hard to get the bill through the Commons.

Nineteen Labour MPs rebelled over ID cards in the last parliament and it would now take only 15 more votes against to derail the legislation.

Ministers hope the prospect of discounted charges for lower-income groups such as pensioners will help garner support. They also argue that 70 per cent of the cost of the project will have to be spent anyway, to meet the demands of the US and other countries for biometric identities on passports.

Yesterday, the government argued that ID cards were needed to stop the soaring cost of identity theft, playing down previous issues such as counter-terrorism, which have raised concerns among trade union, human rights and Muslim groups.

The Home Office referred to the results of a survey published earlier this week showing that five out of 10 people backed ID cards as the best way to combat identity fraud.

John Cridland, deputy director-general of the CBI business group, said ID cards could be a positive step towards tackling the growing cost to companies and consumers of identity theft, estimated at £1.3bn a year.

The introduction of ID cards is also expected to boost the biometric industry, with the biometrics used in the cards likely to become an industry standard.

By Jimmy Burns and Christopher Adams
Financial Times http://news.ft.com
http://news.ft.com/cms/s/c6ab4960-cd81-11d9-aa26-00000e2511c8.html

We use a simple growth model with public capital to examine the evolution of the US macroeconomy and to discuss the implications of the public infrastructure decline for the productivity slowdown over the last four decades. The main difference of the model to other papers in the related literature is that public investment is actively managed as a non-linear function of the state of the economy, and is not a constant fraction of output in every period. The active management policy delivers transition dynamics that reproduce the public capital downsizing episode, but that accounts for only a minor fraction of the observed productivity slowdown. However, taking into consideration higher rates of returns to public capital or the reallocation of public resources from productive to unproductive expenditures, which is consistent with the US experience in the 70s and 80s, the model simulation accounts for most of the observed productivity slowdown.

By Gustavo A. Marrero, Universidad Complutense de Madrid and ICAE
BE Press Topics in Macroeconomics: www.bepress.com
Vol. 5: No. 1, Article 9
http://www.bepress.com/bejm/topics/vol5/iss1/art9

The University of Maryland is going to be at the forefront of research examining the forces driving the competitiveness and complexity of the nation's biotechnology industry.

With a $250,000, three-year matching grant from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation in New York, the university will establish a research center bringing academicians and industry representatives together to identify ways to make the risky business of biotechnology more efficient and effective.

Called the Sloan Biotechnology Industry Center, the organization joins a network of 25 similar university-based facilities around the country - all initially funded by the foundation started by former General Motors Corp. boss Alfred P. Sloan Jr. - spanning 25 industries.

The University of Maryland is the first to focus on biotechnology.

It takes between 10 and 14 years to develop a therapeutic and it costs over $800 million, almost $1 billion, to produce a single product, said Shawn Lofstrom, the University of Maryland center's research director. If you can find ways to reduce it even by 10 percent, that would be phenomenal.

Lofstrom and the center's director, Jacques Gansler, have spent the last several months - with the input of the biotechnology industry, local and national - developing a research agenda and recruiting researchers from fields as diverse as biology, chemistry, business law and ethics.

The five areas of study that emerged cover the lifespan of a biotechnology company, from the uncertainties facing startups to regulation and public policy.

The center will examine, for example, strategies that could help biotechnology companies reduce costs and development time for startup products. It will weigh the costs and benefits of conducting research and clinical trials overseas, and it will analyze the government policies and industry-wide practices that give the United States its competitive edge.

Evaluating the uncertainties startups face likely will be one of three areas the center will start to tackle this summer, the rest to follow in the fall and spring, said Lofstrom.

Fundraising will be a major factor in the center's future since the $250,000 Sloan Foundation grant is nonrenewable.

This is seed funding, said Gail Pesyna, program director of the foundation. They have to come up with a match right up front and show us what they've already got. It [the grant] is helpful because they can use the funding to help leverage other sources of funding. It's like the Good Housekeeping seal of approval.

The centers thriving around the country generally need between $500,000 and $1 million per year to operate, Pesyna said.

She added, however, that the University of Maryland was chosen - after a number of other universities had been turned down over the years - in part because it has the kind of deep relationships it will need with the biotechnology industry to attract additional funding.

Biotechnology companies will likely support the center through membership, said Gansler, but the specifics are still being worked out.

by Robyn Lamb
The Daily Record (University of Maryland) www.newsdesk.umd.edu
http://proquest.umi.com/pqdweb?did=832552121&sid=1&Fmt=3&clientId=13371&RQT=309&VName=PQD
http://www.newsdesk.umd.edu/um_in_news/index.cfm

One explanation for the cost to mating for females caused by damaging male mating behavior is that this causes the females to adaptively modify their subsequent life histories in a way that also increases male fitness. This might occur because the reduction in residual reproductive value of the female increases her optimal oviposition rate or because an increase in the current level of damage increases the female's optimal remating interval. In this article, C M Lessells presents models of a stochastic dynamic game in which males choose the level of mating damage that they inflict on females and females choose their oviposition rate and whether to remate. The models show that some level of damage is always an evolutionarily stable strategy and may even provoke females into making terminal reproductive investment (and hence a semelparous life history), that nondamaging populations are always invaded by damaging male mutants, and that damage evolves because of its effect on oviposition rate and despite its effect on remating interval.

Females remate at decreasing intervals throughout their reproductive span. In this example, females remate at least one time step before they would become totally infertile, emphasizing that remating is a strategic decision balancing the costs and benefits of mating. Within each mating interval, oviposition rate tends to rise slightly and then fall. This is the outcome of the value of current oviposition and residual fitness both falling, but at different rates. The value of current reproduction falls because of decreasing fertility. Residual fitness falls because of the reduction in fertility of eggs laid in the remaining time steps before remating and an increasingly imminent increase in damage as a result of remating. The oviposition rate in the time step in which a female mates becomes higher with successive matings. This happens because the female's residual fitness is lower because of the accumulated damage. Eventually, females make a terminal reproductive investment by laying the physiologically maximum number of eggs leading to certain death before the next time step.

by C M Lessells
The American Naturalist www.journals.uchicago.edu/AN/
Chicago: May 2005. Volume 165 page S46, 18 pages
http://proquest.umi.com/pqdweb?did=831631691&sid=1&Fmt=4&clientId=13371&RQT=309&VName=PQD
http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/AN/