Weil D
Department of Finance/Economics, Boston University School of Management, Cambridge, MA 02138, USA.
Am J Ind Med. 2001 Oct;40(4):418-37. doi: 10.1002/ajim.1114.
Workplace injuries and fatalities in the US create significant economic costs to society. Although economic costs should measure the opportunity cost to society arising from injuries and fatalities, estimating them often proves difficult as a practical matter. This leads to a range of estimates for valuing these costs.
This paper compares methods of economic valuation, focusing in particular on how different methods diverge to varying degrees from measuring the "true" economic costs of injuries and illnesses. In so doing, it surveys the literature that has arisen in the past 25 years to measure different aspects of economic consequences.
Estimates of the costs of injuries and fatalities tend to understate the true economic costs from a social welfare perspective, particularly in how they account for occupational fatalities and losses arising from work disabilities.
Although data availability often makes estimation of social welfare costs difficult, researchers should attempt to more fully integrate such approaches into estimation procedures and interpretation of their results.
美国职场中的工伤和死亡给社会造成了巨大的经济成本。尽管经济成本应衡量因工伤和死亡给社会带来的机会成本，但实际上，对其进行估算往往很困难。这导致了对这些成本估值的一系列不同结果。
本文比较了经济估值方法，特别关注不同方法在多大程度上偏离了对工伤和疾病“真实”经济成本的衡量。在此过程中，它审视了过去25年里出现的用于衡量经济后果不同方面的文献。
从社会福利角度来看，工伤和死亡成本的估算往往低估了真实的经济成本，尤其是在对职业死亡和因工作残疾造成的损失的计算方式上。
尽管数据可得性常常使社会福利成本的估算变得困难，但研究人员应尝试将此类方法更全面地纳入估算程序及其结果的解释中。
