Skip to main content
U.S. Department of Energy
Office of Scientific and Technical Information

Survey and critique of studies of the economic damages to human health from air pollution

Book ·
OSTI ID:6208055
An extensive review of the effects of air pollution on human health is presented. Analytical tools and methods are evaluated. The author's position is that the state of the art in valuing damages to human health attributable to air pollution has advanced significantly over the last decade. Some of the more recent studies have introduced personal variables, which are suspected of significantly affecting morbidity and mortality. Functional forms allowing estimation of synergistic relationships, in conformance with prior expectations and substantial epidemiological evidence, have also recently been estimated. Recent work has also employed panel data rather than aggregate cross-section data, thereby eliminating a number of potential biases. Despite these quite substantial improvements in the quality of empirical analyses, much empirical work remains to be done both replicating and extending previous analyses to reduce the wide range of uncertainty regarding the estimation of air pollution damages. The estimation of models assuming non-normal distribution of expected biological response to environmental insults is one promising area which will hopefully receive more attention in the future. Until more of this work is completed, any analysis of the optimality of pollution standards, which requires the derivation of marginal benefits from total benefit functions, can only proceed with great uncertainty.
OSTI ID:
6208055
Country of Publication:
United States
Language:
English