정책적 맥락에서의 우리나라 인명의 가치측정 = The Value of Life in the Korean Policy Making Context

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

The purpose of this study is to estimate the value of life saved as a benefit of public policy, and in so doing, overcome some of the major problems often found in the literature. First, this study applies the contingent valuation method (CVM), which is reported to be more rigorous than other existing methods such as the human capital method, hedonic price method, averting behavior method, etc. Second, this study also tries to resolve some of major weakness of CVM such as ① respondents` misperception of the probability of death may result in biased estimations when the probability is extremely low, ② valuing the life saved as a private good can cause a biased estimation, since one person`s death will affect the welfare of the people around him/her, ③ the context given to respondents is quite different from the policy-makers`. Third, the CVM scenario of this study motivated respondents to consider carefully their budget constraint as they were asked to consider the loss of public service as the cost of their valuation of a life. As a result we expect the WTP of those surveyed might be closer to their real ones than other CVM studies with unusual and uruealistic financial constraints. Fourth, the situational context in this survey is the same as the policy-makers`. Therefore the resulting figure can be applied to various policy settings. The value of one life is estimated to be 794 million won, which means that people tend to allow government to spend 794 million won for saving one life. This result seems to prove that the governmental budget constraint really worked as we expected. The shortcomings of this research are as follow. First, we cannot identify the factors determining the estimated level. Second, the sample covers only the Seoul area due to time and financial constraints.