In developing and industrial countries alike, there is concern that health and safety policy may respond to irrational fears - to the"disaster of the month"- rather than address more fundamental problems. In the United States, for example, some policymakers say the public worries about trivial risks while ignoring larger ones and that funding priorities reflect this view. Many public health programs with a low cost per life saved are underfunded, for example, while many environmental regulations with a high cost per life saved are issued each year. Does the existing allocation of resources reflect people's preoccupation with the qualitative aspects of risks, to the exclusion of quantitative factors (lives saved)? Or can observed differences in the cost per life saved of environmental and public health programs be explained by the way the two sets of programs are funded? The authors examine the preferences of U.S. citizens for health and safety programs. They confronted a random sample of 1,000 U.S. adults with choices between environmental health and public health programs, to see which they would choose. The authors then examined what factors (qualitative and quantitative) seem to influence these choices. Respondents were asked about pairs of programs, among them: smoking education or industrial pollution control programs, industrial pollution control or pneumonia vaccine programs, radon eradication or a program to ban smoking in the workplace, and radon eradication or programs to ban pesticides. The survey results, they feel, have implications beyond the United States. They find that, while qualitative aspects of the life-saving programs are statistically significant in explaining people's choices among them, lives saved matter, too. Indeed, for the median respondent in the survey, the rate of substitution between most qualitative risk characteristics and lives saved is inelastic. But for a sizable minority of respondents, choice among programs appears to be insensitive to lives saved. The interesting question for public policy is what role the latter group plays in the regulatory process.
Download Info
To download:
If you experience problems downloading a file, check if you have the
proper application to
view it first. Information about this may be contained
in the File-Format links below. In case of further problems read
the IDEAS help
file. Note that these files are not on the IDEAS
site. Please be patient as the files may be large.
References listed on IDEAS Please report citation or reference errors to , or , if you are the registered author of the cited work, log in to your RePEc Author Service profile, click on "citations" and make appropriate adjustments.: