Seldom considered is whether markets do an adequate job of shaping our tastes. David George argues that they do not, and that the standard economic definition of efficiency can be used to demonstrate that the market ignores people's desires about their desires. He concludes that markets perform poorly with respect to second-order preferences, thus worsening the problem of undesired desires. The book further investigates changes in perceptions and public policy toward such activities as gambling, credit, entertainment, and sexual behavior. David George is Chair and Professor Economics, LaSalle University.

There is a truly enormous literature on using stated preference information to place a monetary value on environmental amenities. This three volume set provides the key papers for understanding the historical development of contingent valuation, its theoretical and statistical foundations, and the major controversies. It also contains representative papers covering all of the major application areas in environmental valuation.

The United States is among the wealthiest nations in the world, but it is far from the healthiest. Although life expectancy and survival rates in the United States have improved dramatically over the past century, Americans live shorter lives and experience more injuries and illnesses than people in other high-income countries. The U.S. health disadvantage cannot be attributed solely to the adverse health status of racial or ethnic minorities or poor people: even highly advantaged Americans are in worse health than their counterparts in other, "peer" countries. In light of the new and growing evidence about the U.S. health disadvantage, the National Institutes of Health asked the National Research Council (NRC) and the Institute of Medicine (IOM) to convene a panel of experts to study the issue. The Panel on Understanding Cross-National Health Differences Among High-Income Countries examined whether the U.S. health disadvantage exists across the life span, considered potential explanations, and assessed the larger implications of the findings. U.S. Health in International Perspective presents detailed evidence on the issue, explores the possible explanations for the shorter and less healthy lives of Americans than those of people in comparable countries, and recommends actions by both government and nongovernment agencies and organizations to address the U.S. health disadvantage.

In this two volume collection the editors have chosen a sample of some of the most essential and inspirational articles and papers for understanding revealed preference methods to value environmental amenities. The papers cover the gamut of methods that are typically classified as revealed preference approaches - including: recreation demand models, hedonic methods, and averting behavior methods, as well as efforts to combine stated and revealed preferences. While this collection is far from exhaustive, the editors have included papers they believe will represent the state of the art in the theory and application of revealed preference methods, contribute to development of the state of the art, or raise fundamental challenges and insights that will drive the research agenda in the coming years.

Re-examining Mary Douglas’ work on pollution and concepts of purity, this volume explores modern expressions of these themes in urban areas, examining the intersections of material and cultural pollution. It presents ethnographic case studies from a range of cities affected by globalization processes such as neoliberal urban policies, privatization of urban space, continued migration and spatialized ethnic tension. What has changed since the appearance of Purity and Danger? How have anthropological views on pollution changed accordingly? This volume focuses on cultural meanings and values that are attached to conceptions of ‘clean’ and ‘dirty’, purity and impurity, healthy and unhealthy environments, and addresses the implications of pollution with regard to discrimination, class, urban poverty, social hierarchies and ethnic segregation in cities.

The monetary valuation of environmental goods and services has evolved from a fringe field of study in the late 1970s and early 1980s to a primary focus of environmental economists over the past decade. Despite its rapid growth, practitioners of valuation techniques often find themselves defending their practices to both users of the results of applied studies and, perhaps more troubling, to other practitioners. One of the more heated threads of this internal debate over valuation techniques revolves around the types of data to use in performing a valuation study. In the infant years of the development of valuation techniques, two schools of thought emerged: the revealed preference school and the stated preference school, the latter of which is perhaps most associated with the contingent valuation method. In the midst of this debate an exciting new approach to non-market valuation was developed in the 1990s: a combination and joint estimation of revealed preference and stated preference data. There are two primary objectives for this book. One objective is to fill a gap in the nonmarket valuation "primer" literature. A number of books have appeared over the past decade that develop the theory and methods of nonmarket valuation but each takes an individual nonmarket valuation method approach. This book considers each of these valuation methods in combination with another method. These relationships can be exploited econometrically to obtain more valid and reliable estimates of willingness-to-pay relative to the individual methods. The second objective is to showcase recent and novel applications of data combination and joint estimation via a set of original, state-of-the-art studies that are contributed by leading researchers in the field. This book will be accessible to economists and consultants working in business or government, as well as an invaluable resource for researchers and students alike.

Just as individuals have preferences regarding the various goods and services they purchase every day, so they also hold preferences regrding public goods such as hose provided by the naural environment. However, unlike provate goods, environmental goods often cannot be valued by direct reference o any market price. Thsi amkes economic analysis of the costs and benefits of environmental change problematic. Over the past few decades a number of methods have developed to address this problem by attempting to value environmental preferences. Principal among hese has been the contingent valuation (CV) method which uses surveys to ask individuals how much they would be willing to pay or willing to accept in compensation for gains and losses of environmental goods. The period from the mid-1980s to the present day has seen a m,assive expansion in use of the CV method. From its originalroots int eh USA, through Europe and the developed world, the method has now reached worldwide application with a substantial proportion of current studies being undertaken in developing countries where environmental services are often the dominating determinant of everyday living standards. The method has simultaneously moved from the realm of pure academic speculation into the sphere of instiutional decision analysis. However, the past decade also witness a developing critique of the CV method with a number of commentators questioning the underlying validity of its dervied valuations. This volume, therefore, reflects a time of heated debate, as wellas from commentators who see it as an interesting experimental tool regardless of the question of absolute validity of estimates. The book embraces the theoritical, methodologicl, empirical, and institutional aspects of the current debate. It covers US, European , and developing country applications, and the institutional frameworks within which CV studies are applied.