Valuing Health Effects of Air Pollution in Developing Countries: The Case of Taiwan

Income and environmental R&D: empirical evidence from OECD countries

“…This outcome suggests that emissions of at least some pollutants might decline with income after a threshold level of income is reached. Additionally, the elasticity estimates reported here are larger by a factor of two or three than might be expected based on income elasticity estimates of willingness to pay for specific environmental improvements obtained in certain contingent valuation and hedonic price studies (e.g., Loehman et al, 1979;Alberini et al, 1994;Kristrom and Riera, 1996). This comparison indicates that government spending on environmental improvements may be more responsive to income changes than is individual willingness to pay.…”

“…In any case, the ultimate impact of public research and development expenditures on environmental protection is likely to be larger than those measured in the home country. Second, income elasticities reported below may be larger than expected based on examining income elasticities for specific environmental goods considered in contingent valuation studies (e.g., Loehman et al, 1979;Alberini et al, 1994;Kristrom and Riera, 1996), although they may not be entirely consistent with conjectures of Borcherding and Deacon (1972), Pearce (1980) and Baumol and Oates (1988), who suggest that environmental quality may be a superior good. The remainder of this paper is divided into three sections.…”

Willingness to pay and municipal water pricing in transition: a case study

“…This supports the expected result that respondents expecting substantial reduction in expenditure on home purification methods and medical treatment of waterborne illness are likely to pay more. Alberini et al (1997) found educational attainment to be a statistically significant determinant of the WTP. Jordan and Elnagheeb (1993) have also found the education variable to be positive and significant indicating that respondents with a higher level of education were willing to pay more than respondents with a lower level of education.…”

Climate Policy Without Tears

“…A number of morbidity risk studies find an income elasticity of WTP below unity (Loehman and De, 1982;Alberini et al, 1997), while the results of mortality risk studies are less consistent, with one meta-analysis of US studies yielding an elasticity estimate significantly greater than one 9 (Bowland and Beghin, 1998) and another an estimate less than one ; see also Krupnick et al, 1996). Since we have no a priori reason to prefer one hypothesis to the other, we initially assume an income elasticity of unity for the base case and perform sensitivity analysis around this value.…”