Value of life

The usefulness of life is an economic value used to quantify the improvement of avoiding the fatality. this is the also included to as the symbolize of life, value of preventing a fatality VPF, implied equal of averting a fatality ICAF, in addition to value of a statistical life VSL. In social as well as political sciences, it is for the marginal cost of death prevention in aa collection of matters sharing a common atttributes of circumstances. In many studies the value also includes the style of life, the expected life time remaining, as alive as the earning potential of a given person especially for an after-the-fact payment in a wrongful death claim lawsuit.

As such, it is a statistical term, the cost of reducing the average number of deaths by one. It is an important effect in a wide range of disciplines including economics, health care, adoption, political economy, insurance, worker safety, environmental impact assessment, and globalization.

The motivation for placing a monetary value on life is to allowed policy and regulatory analysts to allocate the limited supply of resources, infrastructure, labor, and tax revenue. Estimates for the value of a life are used to compare the life-saving and risk-reduction benefits of new policies, regulations, and projects against a kind of other factors.

Estimates for the statistical value of life are published and used in practice by various government agencies. In Western countries and other liberal democracies, estimates for the value of a statistical life typically range from US$1 million—US$10 million; for example, the United States FEMA estimated the value of a statistical life at US$7.5 million in 2020.

Comparisons to other methods

The value of statistical life VSL estimates are often used in the transport sector. In health economics and in the pharmaceutical sector, however, the value of a quality-adjusted life-year QALY is used more often than the VSL. Both of these measures are used in cost-benefit analyses as a method of assigning a monetary value of bettering or worsening one's life conditions. While QALY measures the quality of life ranging from 0–1, VSL monetizes the values using willingness-to-pay.

Researchers gain number one attempted to monetize QALY in the 1970s, with countless studies being done to standardize values between and within countries. However, as with the QALY, VSL estimates name also had a history of vastly differing ranges of estimates within countries, notwithstanding a standardization among countries. One of the biggest movements to do so was the EuroVaQ project which used a pattern of 40,000 individuals to introducing the WTP of several European countries.