Personal willingness to pay for prevention: evaluating the consequences of accidents as a basis for preventive measures.

This paper argues that if scarce resources are to be allocated efficiently and to greatest advantage then it is necessary to have explicit monetary measures of the benefits of reduced accident rates so that these benefits can be weighed against costs in the process of determining the appropriate amount to expend on alcohol-related accident prevention programmes. The conceptual issues related to the definition and estimation of monetary values of safety are discussed and the case in favour of basing such values on individual willingness to pay for safety is developed. The paper then summarises existing empirical estimates of willingness-to-pay based values for the prevention of fatalities and reports the preliminary results of recent work aimed at estimating willingness-to-pay based values for the prevention of non-fatal injuries. The paper concludes by examining the applicability of existing empirical estimates of the value of safety in the alcohol-related accident context and the transferability of estimates derived in developed countries to the developing country context.