The overall objective of socio-economic assessment is to maximize the benefits of future investment in an enterprise in a sound and sustainable way. This chapter provides a review of various techniques that have been developed overtime for evaluating socio-economic benefits of non tradable good and services and ends with a discussion on how one of the techniques was utilized in evaluating the socio-economic benefits of cattle in the present study. The chapter comprises of three sections. The first section highlights various techniques for evaluating socio-economic benefits, situations under which each of the techniques are utilized, their advantages and disadvantages. The second section of the chapter provides a review of past studies that have attempted to evaluate non-marketed benefits of livestock. It also explains the method each of the study utilized, the findings and conclusion. The third and final section of this chapter concludes with how the present study differs from past studies and its likely contribution to literature.

2.1 Socio-economic valuation techniques

Overtime economists have developed techniques to determine the value of goods and services that are not tradable. These techniques have been categorized broadly into revealed preference techniques, stated preference techniques and ex ante assessment (Dofonsou et. al., 2008). Revealed preference techniques rely on values being inferred from people’s behavior in markets that are in some way connected to the socio-economic value. Revealed-preference methods exploit the relationship between some forms of individual behavior and associated environmental attributes to estimate value. Their main example includes hedonic pricing (HPM) and travel cost method (TCM). Ex-ante assessment measure the trade-offs resulting from a change to an existing management of a resource (Campbell et. al., 2003). An example of ex-ante assessment technique is the cost benefit analysis (CBA).