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Arsenic contamination of drinking water is a serious public health issue in many areas of South and South East Asia. One study estimates that in Cambodia over 100,000 people are exposed, with the majority of those living in Kandal Province. In this thesis we present 3 original empirical studies focused on estimating nonmarket values for reduced arsenic risk water, based on primary data collected in May 2013. We also present a review paper which discusses the various economic techniques which have typically been used to estimate welfare values for cost-benefit analysis of mitigation strategies or appraisal of drinking water standards. The first empirical paper presents the results of a discrete choice experiment (DCE)to estimate willingness to pay (WTP) values for reduced arsenic water. We discuss the results of scale-extended latent class choice models and underlying differences in preferences and choice consistency. We find that a reduction in the permissible limit on arsenic in drinking water may best represent underlying household preferences for risk. The second empirical paper presents the results of a split sample choice experiment focusing on differences between money (WTP) and labour contributions (WTWork) as payment vehicles in terms of choice behaviour and attribute non-attendance. We find that the results from the two experiments are relatively consistent which reinforces our results from the previous chapter that focuses on WTP measures alone and adds credibility to the large numbers of DCEs conducted in rural areas of developing countries. The final empirical paper examines actual household behaviour relative to an arsenic testing and education campaign run by a local NGO. We find that the vast majority of households change their drinking water source upon being informed that it is unsafe. On average households that switch increase their expenditures. In doing so however they also reduce the amount of time spent collecting water which limits the use of expenditure changes as an approximation of welfare values.

This thesis analyses the life and works of the courtier and writer Sir Arthur Gorges, reading Gorges's poetic and prose texts as a sequence of attempts to come to terms with the pressures of the renaissance patronage system. The first chapter is a survey of Gorges's career. Further chapters analyse texts by genre. Chapter 2 studies Gorges's manuscript letters, most of them written to his patron Sir Robert Cecil, in the light of renaissance epistolographic conventions. Chapter 3 gives an account of the textual history of Gorges's manuscript poetry and the context of its composition at the Elizabethan and Jacobean courts. Chapter 4 analyses three poems which present the reader with the spectacle of Gorges mourning the death of a patron- figure: Daphnaida (Spenser's elegy on the death of Gorges's first wife), 'A Pastoral Unfinished' (Gorges's response to Daphnaida), and The Olympian Catastrophe, (Gorges's long elegy on the death of Prince Henry). Chapter 5 provides a textual history of Gorges's manuscript treatises and analyses the ways in which Gorges revised his treatises in response to the changing nature of his patronage relationships. Chapter 6 looks at Gorges's late translations, reading his version of Lucan's Pharsalia as a patronage text undertaken initially for Prince Henry but fatally undermined by Henry's death before its publication. The thesis ends with an account of Gorges's translations of Bacon's Essays (1612) into French and Bacon's De sapientia veterum into English. I argue that Bacon conceived of these two works as closely related texts and encouraged their joint publication in a number of languages as a means of advancing his European reputation and extending his patronage contacts in preparation for the publication of the Novum organum.