This paper concerns the difficulty of taking long-term effects on health into account in an economic valuation. Indeed, public decision makers should incorporate the cessation lag between implementation of an abatement policy and achievement of all of the expected mortality-related benefits for any projects involving health impacts. This paper shows how this time lag problem can be handled by proposing two approaches—either in terms of deaths avoided or of life years saved—within a dynamic perspective. The main findings are that long-term health benefits calculated by standard methods and widely applied to adverse health effects should be corrected downwards when incorporated into an economic analysis. The magnitude of correction depends on the discount rate, on technical choices dealing with epidemiology and on the method chosen to assess mortality benefits.

This article introduces the main results of a contextual contingent valuation survey (i.e. specific to the underlying risk) dealing with a change in air pollution exposition. Individual willingness-to-pay for both health (morbidity and mortality) and non-health effects are elicited. The use of an original hypothetical scenario that involves 1 273 inhabitants of the Bouches-du-Rhône and a convenient econometric model (Box-Cox model with censoring) lead to an overall predicted monthly value of 68,6 euros per household for an half decrease of the number of polluted days. A model of expected life-time resource allocation allows us to evaluate, for the first time, a value of a prevented fatality specific to the air pollution risk : 0,8 million Euros.Classification JEL : C1, I1, Q25, D12

This paper concerns the difficulty of taking into account long term health effects of prevention policies in an economic valuation. The proposed methodology estimates the delay between the implementation of a policy and the achievement of all of the expected mortality-related health benefits. Benefits are assessed both in terms of life years gained and premature deaths avoided for two prevention policies: an air pollution abatement policy and a road safety policy. The main findings are that the relative comparison of the policies?benefits is very sensitive to technical choices dealing with the method chosen to assess mortality benefits and the discount rate.Classification JEL : H43, I12, Q25

The quantification of environmental-related health effects and their valuation in monetary units play a key role for a sustainability-oriented planning of policy measures. The present paper demonstrates the calculation of air pollution-related health costs using the tri-national study of Austria, France and Switzerland on health costs due to transport-related air pollution, that was conducted on behalf of the Third WHO Ministerial Conference (London, 1999). The epidemiological information on exposure-response functions (effect estimates) and health outcome frequencies (mortality and morbidity; prevalence, incidence, or person-days) combined with the air pollution exposure of the population, provides the number of attributable cases to total air pollution and to traffic-related air pollution. For the assessment of health costs, two different methods are available. The main method consists of the willingness-to-pay approach, that assesses the willingness to pay for a reduction in risk, that is for the prevention of a (statistical) fatality or illness. This approach includes the material costs as well as intangible cost elements, i.e. for pain, suffering and the loss of life quality. A partial method is the human-capital approach that estimates the medical costs and the loss of income, production or consumption arising due to premature mortality or morbidity and which only covers the material cost elements. Across the three countries (74 million inhabitants) the health costs due to traffic-related air pollution for the year 1996 amount to some 27 billion €. This amount translates to approximately 1.7% of GDP and an average of 360€ per capita per year. In all three countries, the premature mortality is predominant, accounting for about 70% of the costs.