Cost benefits analyses (CBA) is usually measure IRR or NPV under financial, economic, social and more recently environment. If you can identify "beneficiary" as a community, you can perform CBA under any category. 

Cost and Benefit estimations are made all of the time.  These include costs and benefits to the traders involved as well as measures of costs and benegits that fall on third parties, on those not involved in the transaction.  Costs are benefits are calculated all of the time for environmental decisions.  For instance, recreational demand for a lake can be measured by examining the distances that people travel for that recreational purpose.  Benefits of cleaner air can be measured by examining the effects of pollution on housing values.  Check out a basic environmental economics text, such as the one by Tom Tietenberg and Lynne Lewis: http://www.amazon.com/Environmental-Natural-Resource-Economics-Edition/dp/0321485718

Of course, you may have some other idea of what community cost-benefit analysis would entail.  Please expound a bit on what you are trying to measure.  What is it that you mean by community cost-benefit?

Yes, we can measure and calculate community cost-benefit. This can be achieved by providing welfare schemes to the community involving some costs and pay off may be the result of these schemes and hence benefit be in terms of satisfaction, money and improved health.

Zafer –

I presume you are asking whether a community-level cost-benefit analysis (CBA) can be conducted (as opposed to the standard national-level ‘accounting stance’). So that is the question I will answer.

THE ACCOUNTING STANCE IN CBA

The seminal work introducing the accounting stance concept in CBA is the 1971 American Geophysical Union monograph written by Prof. Charles (Chuck) Howe at University of Colorado. A 2013 reprint is available from Wiley Online Library at http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/9781118665657.ch2/summary

If I interpret correctly your interest in this subject, then I would also advise you to see the 1986 Natural Resource Journal article by Chuck Howe that can be found on-line at http://lawschool.unm.edu/nrj/volumes/26/1/05_howe_project.pdf . This article applies the accounting stance concept.

Multiple CBAs can be presented within one report, using multiple accounting stances – state-level and national-level, for example. These can be useful in understanding why politicians from that state might support projects that are great in terms of state-level CBA but not so great in the national-level CBA.

At the moment, the World Bank and other development finance organizations face methodological issues related to their policy position on GLOBAL climate change versus their old CBA guidelines instructing a NATIONAL accounting stance in CBAs.

Howe’s accounting stance concept is more inclusive than the ‘stakeholder’ concept that would come along later. ‘Stakeholders’ are the individual members of the Accounting Stance who have standing in the CBA, meaning that they are the ones whose welfare changes are counted in measuring the costs and benefits.

STAKEHOLDER ANALYSIS IN CBA

Stakeholder analysis is traceable to the French "Method of Effects” of Prou and Cherval. A comparison of Prou and Cherval’s effects method with ‘regular’ CBA contemporaneously written by Bela Balassa can be found in ‘The “Effects Method” of Project Evaluation’ (1976) 38 and 39 Oxford Bulletin of Economics and Statistics, reprinted in World Bank Reprint Series: Number Fifty-Five.

The best-known replication of Prou-Cherval-type analysis in the USA traces back to Eric Monke and Scott Pearson’s Policy Analysis Matrix (PAM) – description available on-line at http://web.stanford.edu/group/FRI/indonesia/reader/Output/reader.html

I hope this addresses the right question.

Best regards,

Bill

It is not possible to measure cost benefit in community development.We can use it for "Tobacco industries" and even you can announce "Smoking is injurious to health", industry will benefit.Where as in society it will spread Cancer.

Zafer,

Cost-benefit analysis is traditionally (an in keeping with the supporting economic theory) conducted at the societal level.  Precisely as Shivappa points out, what seems a benefit for some may cost others, therefore the societal perspective will provide the most convincing cost-benefit results.  Any CBA, however, can be presented from a number of perspectives within the society.  In your example, you could for instance present the following perspectives: (1) Community A + (2) all others = (3) society.

Best,

Tina

There are a number of tools used to look at economic impacts on wider and narrower regional scales.  

The point that Shivappa is making seems to be similar to one made by Coase in "The Problem of Social Costs,"  where he points out the reciprical natiure of social or external costs. Regulation y halts the construction of a local Walmart, keeping home values from sliding, but at the same time imposes an external cost on Walmart or the landowner who was selling land to WalMart.

But I may be misinterpreting Shivappa's point. 

Austrian economists would say that you cannot make these comparisons at a social level because these various costs and benefits are never know/felt/perceived by a single mind.  That weighing the cost to one person against the benefits of another makes no sense.

Morris

Based on the previous discussion, which conversion factors are you going to use in the case of a community-cost benefits in the passage from the financial to the economic analysis? 

I would say, yes, you can measure and calculate, "community cost-benefit," but would want more specific information on your research or CB project.  "Community," can be defined several ways, so that's a vg place to start:  which/what community is the focus of your analysis?  Are there specific factors that will be measured already identified? 

I believe CB on "community" is done very often, but then, I am assuming your definition of "community."

Interesting responses to the question. Zafer, I would tend to look at cost-benefit analysis (CBA) in the context of specific community projects with defined objectives. For example, CBA can be used to examine whether a specific water project in a rural West Africa village designed to bring fresh drinking water has a positive Benefit to Cost ratio. Does the project bring the desired benefits (fresh drinking water) to the target constituency group; how many in the group receive the benefit; and what does it cost to bring those benefits to the group? However, CBA is most useful when you have a variety of alternative approaches to achieving a particular desired end. Defining the desired objective or goal (fresh drinking water for everyone in the village) allows one to frame a rigorous CBA comparing alternative approaches.

If the reason for your question is that in the end you want community acceptance of some proposal, then search for stuff on Impact and Benefit Agreements, like this:

http://www.miningfacts.org/Communities/What-are-Impact-and-Benefit-Agreements-(IBAs)/