The value of health benefits from ambient air quality improvements in Central and Eastern Europe: An exercise in benefits transfer

Alan fnKrupnick, Kenneth fnHarrison, Eric fnNickell and Michael fnToman

Environmental & Resource Economics, 1996, vol. 7, issue 4, 307-332

Abstract: This study is an initial effort to estimate one important category of benefits of environmental improvements in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE), those related to the effects of air pollution on human health. Our estimates are derived from data on ambient air quality in selected CEE locations, together with a model that links these ambient conditions to physical impacts on health and attaches economic values (in dollar terms) to these impacts. Given data limitations, our focus here is on three pollutants: particulates (PM), sulfur dioxide (SO 2 ), and lead (Pb). Our data set includes ambient concentrations for these pollutants in four CEE countries: Bulgaria, Hungary, Poland, and Ukraine. Given the ambient data, dose-response functions taken from the clinical and epidemiological literature in the U.S., Canada, and Western Europe are used to generate estimates of the change in physical effects. These effects then are given an economic value by applying two approaches for scaling unit valuation figures applicable to the U.S. A Monte Carlo model is constructed to propagate the uncertainties of the dose-response functions and unit values to obtain confidence intervals on the total benefits from pollutant reductions in each country. We examine scenarios where the CEE countries improve ambient conditions for the pollutants in question to meet European Community (EC) standards and then compare these scenarios to ones involving uniform percentage ambient reductions across locations in each country. Copyright Kluwer Academic Publishers 1996

Keywords: air quality; particulates; sulfur dioxide; lead; Monte Carlo; benefits transfer (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 1996
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DOI: 10.1007/BF00369622

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