Valuing health impacts from air pollution in Europe: New empirical evidence on morbidity

Health impacts make up a significant portion of the damage costs from air pollution. In lack of European valuation studies on morbidity impacts, transport and energy externality studies and green accounting exercises in Europe have used values from ten year old US valuation studies. Results from a new Contingent Valuation study, using an improved version of th survey design of the most transferred US morbidity study, show that common respiratory symptom days and asthma attacks are valued lower in Norway than in the US, even when the US values are expressed in 1986 dollar values. Thus, the practi e of transferring US estimates and only adjusting the values with the consumer price index would lead to highly biased values in the Norwegian case. The difference between the US and Norwegian values can be explained by improved CV survey and sample design, different preferences in Norway compared to the US, and different public health care systems. We do not know if we can generalise the Norwegian results to the rest of Europe, but these three explanations indicate that the Norwegian values will be better estimates of morbidity values in other Europea countries than transferred values from US studies. Key words: contingent valuation, health, morbidity, air pollution Results from the first phase of the ExternE-project (Externalities of Fuel Cycles) can be found in EC-DG XII (1995). ExternE has in its second phase been extended to cover all electricity generating fuel cycles in most European countries, and the same damage function approach has been adapted and implemented in the transportation sector in selected countries. GARP (Green Accounting Research Project), which draws heavily on the methodology developed in ExternE, has come up with preliminar