DISCOUNTING AND SAFETY

Anticipated effects on the health snd safety of future generations are of central importance in a number of policy contexts. It is therefore somewhat disturbing that there now exists a variety of practices and presciptions concerning the extent to which future safety benefits or disbenefits should be discountered in public sector allocative and reg ulatory decision making. The purpose of this paper is to address this question from the perspective of a fairly comprehensive class of indiv idualistic intertemporal social welfare functions, thereby providing a general framework within which the different prescriptions can be ass essed.