Discounting and the Evaluation of Lifesaving Programs

Maureen Cropper and Paul R Portney

Journal of Risk and Uncertainty, 1990, vol. 3, issue 4, 369-79

Abstract: The evaluation of lifesaving programs whose benefits extend into the future involves two discounting issues. The intragenerational discounting problem is how to express, in age-j dollars, reductions in an individual's conditional probability of dying at some future age k. Havig discounted future lifesaving benefits to the beginning of each individual's life, one is faced with the problem of discounting these benefits to the present--the intergenerational discounting problem. We discuss both problems from the perspectives of cost-benefit and cost-effectiveness analyses. These principles are then applied to lifesaving programs that involve a latency period. Copyright 1990 by Kluwer Academic Publishers

Date: 1990
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