Current practice in project appraisal in Europe.

The work reported in this paper presents the results from the compilation of the national assessment practices in EU25 Member States and Switzerland. The work was completed as part of the current European Union 6th Framework project HEATCO (Developing Harmonised European Approaches for Transport Costing and Project Assessment), which has the objective of developing a set of harmonised guidelines for project assessment and transport costing at an EU level. This paper presents the starting point to this project. Based on the work described in this paper the HEATCO consortium will be developing common definitions and consistent valuation methods for the evaluation of TEN projects.

Previous projects such as EUNET had conducted a similar review to the research presented in this paper. The key reason for repeating the research was the expansion of the EU to 25 countries in May 2004 and the fact that appraisal practices in many countries has evolved since the last survey. A proforma was designed and sent to country representatives to complete. This paper is based predominantly on the results that this data provided. The proforma focused specifically on the use of Cost Benefit Analysis in appraisal with the aim of identifying similarities and differences in country practice. Aside from the national appraisal framework the proforma also considered the individual impacts included in appraisal. The paper describes some of the similarities and differences in how construction costs, time savings, safety and environmental impacts are used across Europe. The paper then concludes with the key differences and similarities as identified by the analysis. This paper aims at providing an overview of the current appraisal practice and more country specific details are given in Odgaard et al (2005).