Int. J. Environ. Res. Public Health 2012, 9(12), 4760-4781; doi:10.3390/ijerph9124760
Valuation of Mortality Risk Attributable to Climate Change: Investigating the Effect of Survey Administration Modes on a VSL
1
Charles University Prague, Environment Center, Jose Martiho 2, 162 00 Praha 6, Czech Republic
2
University of Maryland, AREC, 2200 Symons Hall, College Park, MD 20742, USA
3
Fondazione Eni Enrico Mattei, Isola di San Giorgio Maggiore, Venice 30124, Italy
4
School of Biological Sciences and Institute for a Sustainable World, Queen's University Belfast, Medical Biology Centre, 97 Lisburn Road, Belfast BT9 7BL, UK
*
Author to whom correspondence should be addressed.
Received: 15 October 2012 / Revised: 8 November 2012 / Accepted: 13 December 2012 / Published: 18 December 2012
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Climate Change and Human Health Impacts and Adaptation)
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Abstract
The health impact attributable to climate change has been identified as one of the priority areas for impact assessment. The main goal of this paper is to estimate the monetary value of one key health effect, which is premature mortality. Specifically, our goal is to derive the value of a statistical life from people’s willingness to pay for avoiding the risk of dying in one post-transition country in Europe, i.e., the Czech Republic. We carried out a series of conjoint choice experiments in order to value mortality risk reductions. We found the responses to the conjoint choice questions to be reasonable and consistent with the economic paradigm. The VSL is about EUR 2.4 million, and our estimate is comparable with the value of preventing a fatality as used in one of the integrated assessment models. To investigate whether carrying out the survey through the internet may violate the welfare estimate, we administered our questionnaire to two independent samples of respondents using two different modes of survey administration. The results show that the VSLs for the two groups of respondents are €2.25 and €2.55 million, and these figures are statistically indistinguishable. However, the key parameters of indirect utility between the two modes of survey administration are statistically different when specific subgroups of population, such as older respondents, are concerned. Based on this evidence, we conclude that properly designed and administered on-line surveys are a reliable method for administering questionnaires, even when the latter are cognitively challenging. However, attention should be paid to sampling and choice regarding the mode of survey administration if the preference of specific segments of the population is elicited.Keywords:
Value of Statistical Life (VSL); mortality risk; health benefit; climate change impacts; conjoint choice experiments; survey administration; Computer Assisted Personal Interviewing (CAPI); Computer Assisted Web Interviewing (CAPI); Czech Republic
This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY 3.0).
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Ščasný, M.; Alberini, A. Valuation of Mortality Risk Attributable to Climate Change: Investigating the Effect of Survey Administration Modes on a VSL. Int. J. Environ. Res. Public Health 2012, 9, 4760-4781.
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