7.0. Economic Aspects of Oceanography 
7.1. INTRODUCTION 
An ideal economic evaluation of oceanographic research and de- 
velopment would compare the future performance of an economy 
with and without different levels of expenditure for oceanographic 
programs. It would emphasize that the value of the oceanography 
is likely to be crucially dependent upon concurrent technological, 
demographic, and economic developments. Moreover, it would deter- 
mine the value of the programs only after due consideration of their 
interactions with other existing and potential economic activities. 
For example, an investment in oceanography might find deposits of 
low-grade nickel ore on the sea floor. However, the same investment 
might also find similar ores on land. Likewise, developments in 
metallurgy might substantially reduce requirements for nickel in al- 
loys of steel and thereby make all but the highest grade ores on land 
uneconomical to mine. These are rather simple alternatives. Analy- 
sis may become much more complex if such problems as the strength 
of the merchant marine or the drain on gold reserves enter into con- 
sideration. Finally, the analysis becomes much more uncertain as 
the time between expenditure and potential benefit increases. 
Consequently, a really effective model for evaluating oceanographic 
programs is almost certainly beyond the state of the art. We are 
reduced to accepting the usual alternative used by economists when 
evaluating large Government programs; namely, partial analysis on 
a project-by-project basis. The validity of this approach usually 
depends crucially on the assumption that certain interactions between 
the program and other economic activities are relatively unimportant. 
The technique is widely used in the Defense Department but the plan- 
ning horizon is usually only 5 years and the application usually has 
been to develop the optimum means for achieving a fairly well-defined 
objective. Thus, this application is considerably simpler than an 
analysis of the potential economic benefits of oceanographic research 
and development programs which has neither agreed objectives nor 
a definite time limit. 
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