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, cost-benefit analyses, transport and energy externality studies, and green accounting exercises in Europe have all used values from more than ten year old US valuation studies. Results from a new Contingent Valuation study, using an improved version of the survey design of the most transferred US morbidity study, show that respiratory symptom days and asthma attacks are valued lower in Norway than in the US. Correction were made for differences in purchase power between the two countries, but the US values are still expressed in 1986 dollar values; indicating that the difference between the two estimates could be even higher. Thus, the practise of transferring US estimates and only adjusting the values with the consumer price index could 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 results from this Norwegian study to the rest of Europe, but the study clearly illustrates the uncertainty in transferring results from one country to another.