How Much Will People Pay For Longevity? – Article review
Summary: how Much Will People Pay For Longevity?
The purpose of this paper is to discuss the article “How Much Will People pay for Longevity?” written by Alan J. Krupnick. It was discussed in this article that the enhancement in air quality and drinking water can play an significant role in extending people’s lives. Along with the improvement in morbidity, perfection in air quality and drinking water supply as the main drivers for lots of the main governmental authorization in the United States and Canada, such as the U.S. Clean Air Act and the Canadian Environmental Protection Act.
The techniques for shaping the value of a statistical life a shorthand term for the willingness to reimburse separated by the risk of mortality decline being practiced have general deficiencies.
In this article, the author addressed these limitations by focusing persons of 40 to 75 years old in order to obtain their “willingness to pay” (WTP) for turn down the near danger of death. Here the author wanted to verify the WTP for a decline in danger of death in an appropriate perception for contamination, how WTP would differ along with age, whether WTP would be prejudiced by present health position, and how latency would influence “willingness to pay”.
In order to get answers of all above given questions the survey was administered to 930 people in Hamilton, Ontario, in 1999, by a Canadian survey-research firm. Participants were enlisted by phone through random-digit dialing and asked to go to a facility in downtown Hamilton to play a part in the survey. The purpose of the survey was to approximate what old age people would disburse for a decline in their danger of dying and to study the impact of health condition on WTP. The population that was marked for this research was the population aged 40 years to 75 years. The average age of the participants was 54 years, from them there were 31% who had age above 60, and 9% were more than 70 years old. From the respondents 80% were completed high school, only 20% had completed a university degree. $54,000 (1999 C$) was the average household income of the participants. It was noticed that there were 59 respondents who rated their health as very good to excellent, although 41% reported some chronic respiratory or heart disease.
The survey was divided into five parts. Part I introduced the project’s sponsors RFF, Health Canada, and McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario and elicited personal information about the respondent, including questions about the respondent’s health as well as the health of immediate family members. Part II established the subject to simple probability ideas through coin tosses and roulette wheels. Part III presented the primary causes of death for someone of the participant’s age and gender. Common risk-mitigating behavior was noted mutually along with the quantitative risk falls they attain and a qualitative estimate of the costs connected with them (“inexpensive,” “moderate,” and “expensive”). Part IV obtains WTP by requests if participants were keen to pay a given amount and then, depending on their responds, they were given a follow-up offer to admit or reject. Part V integrated a wide series of debriefing questions, pursued by some final questions concerning education and domestic income.
It was observed that from the acquired results that the dimension of the risk reduction has a strong pressure on WTP. Mean “willingness to pay” for an annual decline in risk of death of 5 in 10,000 is approximately 1.5 times the “willingness to pay” for an annual risk decline of 1 in 10,000. So, WTP is perceptive to the size of the risk reduction but not firmly comparative to it. In fact, the overarching practical results of this study is not only that the VSL may be less than that in use for pollution- related benefit cost analyses, but also that diverse VSLs may be suitable in some situations concerning the age and health of pretentious populations. It was concluded that advantages of air pollution decline, which do not have a cancer result and have an effect on primarily an older population, are being considerably overvalued in the U.S. and probably in Canada, and in other countries too that depend on the present literature or mimic U.S. practice.
It was found from this study that it is necessary to estimate that how much people would pay now for a reduction in their risk of dying in the future.