The valuation of environmental risks and hazardous waste policy

Raucher (1986) first drew attention to these issues by suggesting that in some cases ex ante actions to prevent groundwater contamination would not have been preferred to ex post corrective actions. Argues that Raucher's conclusions must be carefully qualified because his conceptual framework does not consider how risk affects individuals' valuations of the policies involved. By focusing primarily on the community's expected costs of alternative policies, his analysis assumes that each policy will yield equivalent services. Analysis suggests that benefit measures for policies involving risk from hazardous wastes or any other policy related risks may need to be constructed differently from the measures considered in conventional benefit-cost studies that assume certainty. -from Authors