A Comparison of Willingness to Pay to Prevent Child Maltreatment Deaths in Ecuador and the United States

Phaedra S. Corso, Justin B. Ingels and M. Isabel Roldos
Additional contact information
Phaedra S. Corso: College of Public Health, University of Georgia, 110 E. Clayton Street, Suite 300, Athens, GA 30602, USA
Justin B. Ingels: College of Public Health, University of Georgia, 110 E. Clayton Street, Suite 300, Athens, GA 30602, USA
M. Isabel Roldos: School of Medicine, Universidad San Francisco de Quito, Quito EC170157, Ecuador

IJERPH, 2013, vol. 10, issue 4, 1-14

Abstract: Estimating the benefits of preventing child maltreatment (CM) is essential for policy makers to determine whether there are significant returns on investment from interventions to prevent CM. The aim of this study was to estimate the benefits of preventing CM deaths in an Ecuadorian population, and to compare the results to a similar study in a US population. The study used the contingent valuation method to elicit respondents’ willingness to pay (WTP) for a 1 in 100,000 reduction in the risk of CM mortality. After adjusting for differences in purchasing power, the WTP to prevent the CM mortality risk reduction in the Ecuador population was $237 and the WTP for the same risk reduction in the US population was $175. In the pooled analysis, WTP for a reduction in CM mortality was significantly impacted by country ( p = 0.03), history of CM ( p = 0.007), payment mechanism ( p < 0.001), confidence in response ( p = 0.014), and appropriateness of the payment mechanism ( p < 0.001). These findings suggest that estimating benefits from one culture may not be transferable to another, and that low- and middle-income countries, such as Ecuador, may be better served by developing their own benefits estimates for use in future benefit-cost analyses of interventions designed to prevent CM.

Keywords: child maltreatment (CM); economic evaluation; willingness-to-pay (WTP); benefit-cost analysis (BCA); contingent valuation (CV) surveys (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I I1 I3 Q Q5 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2013
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.mdpi.com/1660-4601/10/4/1342/pdf (application/pdf)
https://www.mdpi.com/1660-4601/10/4/1342/ (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:gam:jijerp:v:10:y:2013:i:4:p:1342-1355:d:24648

Access Statistics for this article

IJERPH is currently edited by Ms. Jenna Liu

More articles in IJERPH from MDPI
Bibliographic data for series maintained by MDPI Indexing Manager ().