Estimating the monetary value of health care: lessons from environmental economics

In the recent past, considerable effort in health economics has been made on applying stated preference methods such as contingent valuation and choice experiments. Despite this increased use, there is still considerable scepticism concerning the value of these approaches. The application of contingent valuation in environmental economics has a long history and has been widely accepted. Whilst choice experiments were introduced to the environmental and health economics literature at a similar time, the wider acceptance of monetary measures of benefit in environmental economics has meant that they have also been more widely applied. The purpose of this paper is to identify some of the key issues and debates that have taken place in the environmental economics literature, summarise the state of the art with respect to these issues, and consider how health economists have addressed these issues. Important areas for future research in health economics are identified.