Wednesday, September 14, 2005

4:30-5:00 PM Social gathering, light snacks
5:00–6:30 PM Program

Conference Room, CDM
One Cambridge Place, 50 Hampshire Street,
Cambridge, MA

RSVP Required to Korin Scheible at CDM, ScheibleKA@cdm.com by noon the day of the meeting to facilitate security sign in.

Integrating Risk and Economic Assessments

Richard A. Williams, Ph.D.
Associate Director, Social Science Staff
Center for Food Safety and Applied Nutrition
U.S. Food and Drug Administration
5100 Paint Branch Parkway
College Park, Maryland 20740
301 436-1989
RWilliam@CFSAN.FDA.GOV

Summary: A process will be presented for an integrated policy analysis that combines risk assessment and benefit-cost analysis. This concept, which explicitly combines the two types of related analyses, seems to contradict the
long-accepted risk analysis paradigm of separating risk assessment and risk management since benefit-cost analysis is generally considered to be a part of risk management. Yet that separation has become a problem because
benefit-cost analysis uses risk assessment results as a starting point and considerable debate over the last several years focused on the incompatibility of the use of upper bounds or "safe" point estimates in many risk assessments with benefit-cost analysis. The problem with these risk assessments is that they ignore probabilistic information. As advanced probabilistic techniques for risk assessment emerge and economic analysts receive distributions of risks instead of point estimates, the artificial separation between risk analysts and the economic/decision analysts complicates the overall analysis. In addition, recent developments in countervailing risk theory suggest that combining the risk and benefit-cost analyses is required to fully understand the complexity of choices and tradeoffs faced by the decision maker. This article also argues that the separation of analysis and management is important, but that benefit-cost analysis has been wrongly classified into the risk management category and that the analytical effort associated with understanding the economic impacts of risk reduction actions need to be part of a broader risk assessment process.

Biography: Dr. Williams is the Associate Director for Social Science within the Food and Drug Administration’s Center for Food Safety and Applied Nutrition (CFSAN). In this position, he supervises the research of economists, psychologists, agricultural economists, sociologists and statisticians who play leading roles in both risk assessment and cost-benefit analysis. In his 26 years at CFSAN, Dr. Williams has become the FDA’s spokesperson for the economics of food safety and the integration of risk assessment and cost-benefit analysis. He has received numerous awards for his performance at FDA including the Award of Merit twice. Dr. Williams received his Masters and Ph.D. degree in the Philosophy of Economics from Virginia Tech. He has received advanced training in risk assessment and risk communication.

At FDA, Dr. Williams organized a 3-day conference for top agency risk managers and assessors and internationally renowned risk assessors to help FDA assess its risk assessment programs. This conference revitalized risk assessment in CFSAN and helped to launch FDA =s first microbial risk assessment program. He also organized a conference for federal economists on uncertainty in cost-benefit analysis at the White House Conference Center and created a federal peer review process for economic analysis. He has estimated risks, costs and benefits on issues as diverse as HACCP (Hazard Analysis Critical Control Points), labeling education and risk of coronary heart disease and cancer, urethane cancer risk and research on issues including discounting, value of life estimation, property rights, microbial risk assessment and risk-based import sampling. He supervised a team of scientists and economists to create the first microbial risk assessment in CFSAN on the hazards associated with juice. In international work, he has negotiated United States trade positions under the U.S./Canada Free Trade Act. He has created an introduction to risk assessment course with USDA’s ORACBA (Office of Risk Assessment and Cost-Benefit Analysis) and is creating a series of risk analysis classes under the auspices of the World Health Organization, JIFSAN (Joint Institute for Food Safety and Applied Nutrition) and USDA. He has also taught risk analysis courses for the Management Development Center in Denver CO. Dr. Williams is also responsible for reviewing and commenting on Congressional legislation related to risk analysis, has chaired cost hearings for small businesses around the country and has testified before the Senate on regulatory costs. Dr. Williams currently sits on the board of the Harvard Center for Risk Analysis. He recently supervised a report entitled, A Helping Consumers Lead Healthier Lives through Better Nutrition: A Social Sciences Approach to Consumer Information, Food Choices and Weight Management.

Dr. Williams has published in numerous interdisciplinary journals including the Risk Analysis, Journal of Policy Analysis and Management, the American Journal of Public Health, Papers and Proceedings of the Journal of Risk Analysis and the American Journal of Agricultural Economics, Revue Scientific et Technique contributed book chapters, and has given over 40 speeches in risk analysis topics

He is a member of numerous professional associations including the American Economic Association, the Henry Simmons Society and has been a member of the Society for Risk Analysis since 1981. He is also currently a member of the microbial risk assessment subgroup and co-founder of the Economic Benefits Subgroup of the SRA.