Primary Benefits, Secondary Benefits, and the Evaluation of Small Business Assistance Programs
指出小企业援助项目评估中混淆了主要收益与次要收益，导致评估不准确，并提出了改进建议。
When the client of a small business assistance program receives service, it receives a primary benefit in the form of help and consultation. The client may then increase its sales and employment -- but it generates a genuine secondary benefit to the economy only if the sales and jobs are new to the economy. The distinction between primary and secondary in evaluating small business assistance has not been sufficiently appreciated, and, as a result, existing evaluations are inaccurate. This article outlines the sources of the inaccuracies and provides suggestions on how they can be reduced. Among the measures used to evaluate the effectiveness of small business assistance programs are client satisfaction (Weinstein, Nicholls, and Seaton 1992), efficiency (Lang and Golden 1989), academic reactions to college-based programs (Burr and Solomon 1977), and economic impact.(1) One prominent strand of research uses such measures as clients' increases in sales, employment and profits (Robinson 1982; Chrisman, Nelson, Hoy, and Robinson 1985; and Chrisman, Hoy, and Robinson 1987) to gauge and costs. These evaluations evolved independently of a maturing literature in the specialized field of cost-benefit analysis. As a result, two major improvements from that literature have not been incorporated into evaluations of small business programs: 1. Applying the distinction between primary and secondary benefits, now well established in cost-benefit analysis, to refine estimates of primary 2. Correcting estimates to avoid counting secondary which are not net to the economy. PRIMARY AND SECONDARY BENEFITS Primary, or direct, are the net of a good or service to its actual recipients. Secondary, or indirect, are the gains in employment or revenue among firms that receive the primary (Sassone and Schaffer 1978). The distinction arose after World War II, when the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation were claiming large secondary to justify major public water projects. The primary benefit of an irrigation project, for example, would be the net value of the water to farmers. Secondary could include the value of new sales farmers using the water or the added employment on newly irrigated farms. The literature in cost-benefit analysis has since established that primary are real economic benefits, to be weighed against the cost of providing them. However, it also has established that most secondary to one part of an economy are offset losses elsewhere; that is, they cancel out (Anderson and Settle 1977, 24). Even so, the Army Corps and the Bureau of Reclamation counted large amounts for secondary and generally became adept at producing benefit-cost ratios well in excess of unity for any project that had the support of the senators and representatives who controlled agency budgets (Frederick 1991, 40). As early as the 1960s, the literature in cost-benefit analysis was unanimous in condemning agency practice for inflating or deflating costs, or both (Marshall 1966, quoted in Frederick 1991, 40). The Bureau of Reclamation in particular distorted by claiming secondary benefits, often exceeding the primary benefits, that most analysts would not accept as legitimate project benefits (Frederick 1991, 40). Anderson and Settle express the consensus on secondary this way (1977, 25): Social are expressed as the sum of the direct plus any noncanceling secondary benefits. The emphasis is on noncanceling secondary benefits, which in the cost-benefit analysis literature are considered rare. Sassone and Schaffer (1978, 39) add that measurement of secondary in a national cost-benefit analysis is not warranted. The application to small business assistance programs is straightforward. …