Basic Cost Standards depend mainly on factors pertaining to the 
executing organisation and considerable variation can be found in the basic 
cost standards of different organisations. Production Standards, on the other 
hand, are influenced only slightly by factors pertaining to the executing 
organisation (eg the skill and productivity of the operators). They are, how- 
ever, significantly influenced by factors pertaining to the project area (eg 
topographic characteristics of the terrain, density of natural and cultural 
features, etc), by the product specifications (eg required detail to be plotted, 
required accuracy, etc) and last but not least by the process parameters (eg e 
scale of photography, methods and equipment used, etc). Production e i 
Standards should therefore, to a certain extent, be independent of the exe- 
cuting organisation, particularly if one could succeed in classifying personnel 
into appropriate grades according to their productivity and skill. 
An important conclusion of the foregoing might be that reports on new 
methods and procedures should not be accompanied by figures of the total 
production costs, however important this aspect might be to the reporting 
organisation, but rather by detailed information concerning the production 
standards established. Only the latter is of importance to organisations 
interested in applying the proposed procedure to other projects, other project 
areas and possibly even with other product specifications. These two catego- 
ries of standards will be treated separately in the subsequent paragraphs. 
3 Establishment of Basic Cost Standards 
3.1 Different Cost Concepts 
To start with, one should realise that the concept of cost may differ 
with the institutional level under consideration. A distinction should thus be 
4 
made at least between: e o 
— the standpoint of an individual organisation, whether this be a governmental 
agency or a commercial enterprise, and 
— that of a national economy as a whole, in which case the concept of Social 
Cost (or shadow price) should be introduced. 
The distinction between these cost concepts can be illustrated by the 
example of the employment of unskilled or semi-skilled labour in a situation 
of structural unemployment.