IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/cup/jbcoan/v5y2014i02p259-284_00.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

National primary drinking water regulation for arsenic: A retrospective assessment of costs

Author

Listed:
  • Morgan, Cynthia
  • Simon, Nathalie B.

Abstract

This paper compares EPA’s ex ante cost analysis of the 2001 maximum contaminant limit (MCL) for Arsenic in Drinking Water to an ex post assessment of the costs. Because comprehensive cost information for installed treatment technologies or other mitigation strategies pursued by water systems to meet the new standard is not available, this case study relies upon ex post cost data from EPA Demonstration Projects, capturing a total of 50 systems across the US. Information shared by several states and independent associations on the types (but not costs) of treatment technologies used by systems is also summarized. Comparisons of predicted costs to realized costs using our limited data yield mixed results. Plotting the capital cost data from the Demonstration Projects against the cost curves for the compliance technologies recommended for smaller systems, we find that the EPA methodology overestimated capital costs in most cases, especially as the size of the system increases (as measured by the design flow rate).

Suggested Citation

  • Morgan, Cynthia & Simon, Nathalie B., 2014. "National primary drinking water regulation for arsenic: A retrospective assessment of costs," Journal of Benefit-Cost Analysis, Cambridge University Press, vol. 5(2), pages 259-284, June.
    • Handle: RePEc:cup:jbcoan:v:5:y:2014:i:02:p:259-284_00
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://www.cambridge.org/core/product/identifier/S2194588800000774/type/journal_article
    File Function: link to article abstract page
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Simon, Daniel H. & Zirogiannis, Nikolaos & Hollingsworth, Alex, 2017. "Estimating Co-pollutant Benefits from Climate Change Policies in the Electricity Sector: An Empirical Approach," 2017 Annual Meeting, July 30-August 1, Chicago, Illinois 259116, Agricultural and Applied Economics Association.
    2. Fraas, Arthur G. & Kopits, Elizabeth & Wolverton, Ann, 2021. "A Retrospective Review of Retrospective Cost Analyses," RFF Working Paper Series 21-29, Resources for the Future.

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:cup:jbcoan:v:5:y:2014:i:02:p:259-284_00. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Kirk Stebbing (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://www.cambridge.org/bca .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.