New Zealand Treasury Signs Up to the ASVB

Alliance Social Enterprises is pleased to announce that it has signed an ASVB User Licence agreement with NZ Treasury. The ASVB Primary Values have been converted for NZ Treasury so that they are relevant within the New Zealand context.

The NZ Treasury encourages important public sector decisions to be informed by cost benefit analysis (CBA) as outlined in their Guide to Social Cost Benefit Analysis. To help compare different options in New Zealand, the Treasury developed a CBA tool called CBAx which they launched in 2015. CBAx is a spreadsheet model that contains a common database to help agencies monetise impacts and do return on investment analysis, in a similar way to the ASVB Value Calculator.

The NZ Treasury states their CBAX tool provides:

• A common model for organisations to use when analysing costs and benefits of initiatives
• A common basis for assumptions when quantifying and monetising the impacts of different proposals
• A common database to help organisations estimate broader societal impacts, making analysis quicker and providing consistent assumptions.

The ASVB licence agreement allows NZ Government Agencies to use the adjusted ASVB Primary Values internally within their CBAx budget modelling. The next release of the CBAx Tool User Guidance will include reference to how NZ Micro not-for-profit organisations can access individual values from NZ Treasury under their ASVB User Licence.

Alliance Social Enterprises looks forward to an ongoing partnership with NZ Treasury which will hopefully result in the development of further Primary Values which can be added into the ASVB.