Cost-effectiveness is the core focus of most policy conversations, but the quality and availability of costing data from published randomized control trials (RCTs) constrains our ability to learn systematically about the cost-effectiveness of development interventions (Brown and Tanner 2019).
CEGA’s new reporting toolkit addresses this gap in the production of cost evidence for RCTs and fulfills the needs of multiple analytical uses—from the calculation of benefit-cost ratios and social rates of return to estimates of the marginal value of public funds.
Please reach out to Liz Brown (lizbrown@berkeley.edu) with any questions or suggestions.
About the Toolkit
A Costing Pre-analysis Plan Template
CEGA Program Scientist Elizabeth Brown launched a new Costing Pre-analysis Planning template to foster collaboration between cost and impact evaluation research. This work was developed by CEGA’s Cost Transparency Initiative and we welcome your feedback.
A Final Cost Reporting Table
A clear Costing PAP serves as an ideal pipeline to the consistent reporting of cost data across studies. We provide a simple template for final cost reporting which allows teams to move from the Costing PAP to cost reporting in as simple and transparent a manner as possible. This work was developed by Craig McIntosh and Elizabeth Brown and we welcome your feedback.
Individual Costing Tools
More about the table
CEGA’s new cost reporting table provides a comprehensive structure for reporting the cost of evaluated interventions. The table:
- Provides a structure that economists can use to report intervention costs alongside RCTs of development interventions.
- Supports reporting of direct economic, financial, and research costs, in addition to their respective indirect costs, through its flexible but detailed structure. This flexibility facilitates the integration of cost into a wide range of analyses, from the calculation of the marginal value of public funds, to a return on investment and incremental cost-effectiveness ratios.
- Encourages reporting that allows users to impose a consistent costing perspective for all studies so that cost comparisons between two or more studies, including comparisons for systematic reviews and meta-analyses, can be made as internally-comparable as possible.
- Carefully handles the reporting of non-compliance and of averted costs to facilitate the need to adjust costs to the estimand that will be used for the meta-analysis (i.e. most commonly ITT or TOT).
- Syncs with CEGA’s costing pre-analysis planning tool to enable research teams to move from the Costing PAP to cost reporting in as simple and transparent a manner as possible.
More about the toolkit
The available costing guidance adheres to four important design dimensions highlighted in Brown & McIntosh (2025):
- The value of systematic reporting of financial, research, and social costs of interventions alongside RCTs, including the use of costing pre-analysis plans;
- The importance of defining the perspective from which costs are calculated and providing the information to allow this to be altered;
- The need to calculate a cost estimate that reflects the specific impact estimand used in a study; and
- The importance of reporting costs for RCTs regardless of the statistical significance of outcomes.
These issues are relevant whether costing data is used to calculate benefit-cost ratios, internal rates of return, or the marginal value of public funds.
Importantly, we improve on the available guidance for the conduct of conducting costing studies and for evaluating the quality of economic evaluation by tailoring our reporting tool to the reporting requirements of economists who report costs alongside RCTs and by facilitating the comparison of costs across interventions and settings.
Dhaliwal et al. 2013; Anna Vassall, et al. 2017; Glandon et al. 2022; Levin et al. 2018); Husereau, D, Drummond, M., and Augustovski, F. 2022; Anderson et al. 2018; Evers et al. 2005; Watts and Li 2019
