Animal Waste, Water Quality and Human Health

12Economic evaluationRoy Brouwer and Stavros Georgiou12.1 INTRODUCTIONThis chapter considers the economic evaluation of interventions concerned withthe contamination of recreational and other waters by microbial pollution fromlivestock waste. The objective of such interventions is to reduce adverse impactson water quality and public health. Because resources are scarce, regulatorychoices imply trade-offs between the resources needed to manage the problemof water contamination, and other potentially competing uses of those resources.It is important that resources are used as efficiently as possible in the sense thatsociety should make the most of the resources available by comparing what isgained from using those resources with the gain from alternative uses – theso-called opportunity costs. Economic evaluation is thus about determiningwhether an intervention is an efficient use of society’s resources and can bedefined as the comparative analysis of alternative courses of action in terms ofboth their costs and consequences (Drummond et al. 1987). The tasks included© 2012 World Health Organization (WHO). Animal Waste, Water Quality and Human Health. Editedby Al Dufour, Jamie Bartram, Robert Bos and Vic Gannon. ISBN: 9781780401232. Published byIWA Publishing, London, UK.