Mortality Risk Valuation in Six Countries: Evidence from a Contingent Valuation Survey

Developed countries around the world have been conducting cost-benefit analyses of the effects of existing or proposed environmental policies (early examples include USEPA, 1997; 1999; Health Canada, 1997; Canada-Wide Standards Development Committee for PM and Ozone, 1999; European Commission, 1999). These studies always find that the mortality-related effects of pollution reductions dominate the benefits side. But such uniformity should not be taken as evidence of any underlying truths holding across countries. The fact is that many of the studies rely on the same, mostly U.S., epidemiological and mortality valuation literatures and transfer these findings to the target populations. Such transfers have generated much controversy, not only because the values themselves are very large, resulting in benefit estimates that are more than a few percent of personal income, but because differences in incomes, health care systems, health status, population age distributions, culture and other factors make such transfers suspect. In addition, the literature that is being relied upon to ground the transfers is itself suspect because the valuation numbers come from labor market studies. The purpose of this paper is to compare the results of six contingent valuation studies estimating the willingness to pay for mortality risk reductions using virtually the same survey instrument in the U.S., Canada, the U.K., France, Italy and Japan. As all of the individual country results are available elsewhere (Krupnick, et al 2002; Alberini et al, 2004; Alberini et al forthcoming; Itaoka et al, 2005) and each of these papers has described the survey itself and its underlying logic, these will not be described here. Rather, this paper will be limited to presenting new results.