Safety Investment and the Value of Life and Injury

摘要

The requirement to reduce risk is moderated under British law by the notion of practicability or reasonable practicability. This implies that a balance should be struck,inter alia, between the costs of a risk‐reducing measure and its benefits in terms of life‐saving and injury avoidance. Clearly, were lives and injuries valued in monetary terms, balances and imbalances would be all the more easily identified. This paper reports on progress on the application of the Relative Utility Loss Approach to the valuation of injuries in the consumer and transportation spheres in the United Kingdom. Although the tools are as yet imperfect, striking accord is noticed between valuations of a range of serious and slight injuries obtained using three health state utility indices of disparate ori