Maytree has published Making every public dollar count: Bringing the Marginal Value of Public Funds to Canada, the first brief from its two-year research partnership with INCLUSIECON. Written by Selvia Arshad, Gillian Petit, and Lindsay M. Tedds, it introduces a tool that measures what public spending is actually worth to the people it serves, not just what it costs the treasury.
The brief opens from a simple observation: when governments decide where to spend public money, they have strong tools for measuring what programs cost and much weaker tools for measuring what those programs deliver. That asymmetry has consequences. Under fiscal pressure, programs that prevent homelessness, stabilize incomes, or improve children’s long-term outcomes can look expensive on a single budget line, even when they save money across health, education, and justice systems over time. A one-sided ledger produces one-sided decisions.
The Marginal Value of Public Funds (MVPF) is the corrective the brief proposes. It asks what the next public dollar actually creates, and for whom, by comparing the social value a program delivers against its net cost to government: not just the upfront price tag, but the full fiscal picture, including the long-run savings a program generates through higher earnings, better health, and reduced reliance on other services. Crucially, MVPF makes distribution visible: a dollar that prevents deep poverty can carry greater social weight than a dollar reaching a household under far less pressure, and those weights can be stated openly and debated rather than buried in framework defaults.
The brief situates MVPF alongside the analytical tools Canada already has, including cost-benefit analysis, the marginal cost of public funds, and the Parliamentary Budget Officer’s fiscal sustainability work, and argues it complements rather than replaces them, supplying the welfare-and-allocation dimension those tools leave incomplete. It also shows how the framework could be introduced incrementally, starting where comparison is already unavoidable, such as the federal Comprehensive Expenditure Review and major program renewals.
This is the first public output from a two-year partnership between INCLUSIECON and Maytree that is building a Canadian evidence base on how MVPF can be applied across social spending, transfer design, and tax administration. The brief is deliberately foundational. Its job is to socialize the idea and explain what the framework is. Future publications in the partnership will go deeper, with concrete applications to Canadian income security programs, child benefits, and other social spending.
The brief is also explicit that MVPF is not only a tool for government analysts. Non-profits, community organizations, and policy advocates can use the same framework to connect the community-level evidence they hold, such as evictions averted, hospital admissions avoided, and families that stabilized, to the fiscal questions governments actually use to assess spending. Used this way, MVPF becomes a shared vocabulary that lets advocates make the case for high-value programs in terms decision-makers already recognize.
Three threads are worth flagging for policy readers. First, the problem is structural, not a failure of analytical capacity: Canada has well-developed tools for costing revenue and projecting fiscal sustainability, but no consistent way to compare the welfare value of very different programs on a common basis. Second, MVPF works on net cost rather than gross outlay. It captures how programs recover part, and sometimes all, of their cost through higher earnings, higher tax revenues, lower transfer payments, and reduced use of other public systems, which is why some investments in low-income children can more than pay for themselves. Third, distribution is treated as core to value rather than an add-on: leaving distribution out of a spending decision is not avoiding a value judgment; it is making one by default.