This report is an Analysis and Chronology of Developments of West European Communist Parties in 1977.

In current and previous efforts, ECON has provided a preliminary economic assessment of a fusion research program. Part of this effort was the demonstration of a methodology for the estimation of reactor system costs and risk and for the treatment of program alternatives as a series of steps (tests) to buy information, thereby controlling program risk and providing a sound economic rationale for properly constructed research programs. The first phase of work also identified two areas which greatly affect the overall economic evaluation of fusion research and which warranted further study in the second phase. This led to the two tasks of the second phase reported herein: (1) discount rate determination and (2) evaluation of the effect of the expectation of the introduction of fusion power on current fossil fuel prices. In the first task, various conceptual measures of the social rate of discount were reviewed and critiqued. In the second task, a benefit area that had been called out by ECON was further examined. Long-range R and D yields short-term benefits in the form of lower nonrenewable energy resource prices because the R and D provides an expectation of future competition for the remaining reserves at the time of …