Contingent Valuation, Transport Safety and the Value of Life / Edition 1

by Nathalie G. Schwab Christe, Nils C. Soguel

Overview

Over the past two decades, economic theory has extended its field of application to non-market goods such as environmental resources and health. Although it is impossible to assign a price to these goods on the basis of market mechanisms alone, the fact that they have no price does not mean that they have no value. One technique in which economists have shown a marked interest is the contingent valuation method (CVM), which has mainly been used to assign a monetary value to environmental goods. It was first applied to natural resources used for recreational purposes. CVM has been applied to health only recently, so that studies in this field are relatively more scarce than those dealing with the environment, although several valuation methodology surveys are available.
There has hitherto been no book which has drawn together and analyzed recent contingent valuations in the field of transport accidents. Contingent Valuation, Transport Safety and the Value of Life provides an overview of the experiments conducted in Europe (Denmark, France, the U.K., Sweden and Switzerland). While a number of contributions are critical, others show how the estimates obtained in the area of road transport can be used to assess the adverse health effects of other causes, such as public transport accidents or air pollution.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780792395782
Publisher:	Springer Netherlands
Publication date:	05/31/1995
Series:	Studies in Risk and Uncertainty , #7
Edition description:	1995
Pages:	193
Product dimensions:	6.10(w) x 9.25(h) x 0.24(d)

Table of Contents

1 Introduction.- 2 The Valuation of Human Costs by the Contingent Method : The Swiss Experience.- 3 Assessing the Value of Traffic Safety Using the Contingent Valuation Technique: The Danish Survey.- 4 Valuing the Benefits of Reducing the Risk of Non-fatal Road Injuries: The Swedish Experience.- 5 Reference Values for Human Life : An Econometric Analysis of a Contingent Valuation in France.- 6 Why Did Two Theoretically Equivalent Methods Produce Two Very Different Values?.- 7 Are Preferences for Safety too Imprecise for Contingent Valuation?.- 8 Preference-based Values of Safety for Public Transport Modes.- 9 The Automobile Risk Metric for Valuing Health Risks.

Editorial Reviews

Nine papers from the October 1994 Valuing the Consequences of Road Accidents conference in Neuchatel, Switzerland, report on experiments in several European countries which applied to injury and death from transport accidents, a method developed to assign value to environmental resources and health. They focus on theoretical and methodological themes, the papers reporting actual results in the various countries to be published in a forthcoming volume. The topics include the contingent method, reference values for human life, different values from theoretically equivalent methods, and preference-based values for public transportation. No index. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

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