Surveys of willingness-to-pay to avoid negative chemicals-related health effects (SWACHE)
IMPROVING THE KNOWLEDGE BASE FOR THE COST OF INACTION ON CHEMICALS Chemicals are part of our daily life and must be soundly managed to limit risks to human health and the environment. While countries around the world are setting up legal frameworks to address these risks, the cost of policy inaction is still poorly understood. Assessment of chemicals management options and environmental policies can be considerably improved by better estimating their costs and benefits. Financing national chemicals management programmes also often requires economic justification of the benefits of such an investments. However, data to support such analyses are lacking. The OECD project Surveys on Willingness-to-Pay to Avoid Negative Chemicals-Related Health Impacts (SWACHE) project brings together expertise on chemical safety and economic analysis to fill this gap. The project aims to establish internationally comparable values for the willingness-to-pay (WTP) to avoid negative health effects due to exposure to chemicals. Such values can be used to demonstrate and measure the economic benefits of minimising the impacts of chemicals on human health. To derive WTP values, surveys of a large number of citizens of countries have been conducted. These surveys apply state-of-the-art approaches that can be used by economists to determine the full monetary value that survey respondents place on reducing their risk of a particular health effect. Figure 1: Countries in which the first round of SWACHE surveys was implemented
5 Health effects
Kidney disease, asthma, infertility, very low birth weight, IQ loss
1-5 surveys implemented in
22 Countries 46 Surveys in total
1 200 respondents per country, per health effect
1 survey 2 surveys 3 surveys 5 surveys