OECD plans surveys to quantify benefits of chemicals regulation

The OECD is in the early stages of compiling a list of best practices when assessing the economic costs and benefits of chemicals management systems. It will draft studies this year to assess the willingness of the public to pay to avoid certain adverse health effects that can result from chemical exposure. Next year, it plans to carry out these surveys for five endpoints, each from five different countries. The work is being carried out by the OECD’s working party on integrating economic and environmental policies, and builds on a previous project that reviewed cost-benefit analyses on regulating several classes of chemicals, and found major challenges in estimating the benefits of regulation. "It was determined that for many different health effects, we don’t actually have the economic information that is needed in order to do a good cost-benefit assessment,"