Traffic Fatalities and Economic Growth
The authors examine the impact of income growth on the death rate due to traffic fatalities, as well as on fatalities per motor vehicle and on the motorization rate (vehicles/population) using panel data from 1963-99 for 88 countries. Specifically,...
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Language: | English en_US |
Published: |
World Bank, Washington, DC
2014
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Subjects: | |
Online Access: | http://documents.worldbank.org/curated/en/2003/04/2329628/traffic-fatalities-economic-growth http://hdl.handle.net/10986/18267 |
Summary: | The authors examine the impact of income
growth on the death rate due to traffic fatalities, as well
as on fatalities per motor vehicle and on the motorization
rate (vehicles/population) using panel data from 1963-99 for
88 countries. Specifically, they estimate fixed effects
models for fatalities/population, vehicles/population, and
fatalities/vehicles and use these models to project traffic
fatalities and the stock of motor vehicles to 2020.The
relationship between motor vehicle fatality rate and per
capita income at first increases with per capita income,
reaches a peak, and then declines. This is because at low
income levels the rate of increase in motor vehicles
outpaces the decline in fatalities per motor vehicle. At
higher income levels, the reverse occurs. The income level
at which per capita traffic fatalities peaks is
approximately $8,600 in 1985 international dollars. This is
within the range of income at which other externalities,
such as air and water pollution, have been found to peak.
Projections of future traffic fatalities suggest that the
global road death toll will grow by approximately 66 percent
between 2000 and 2020. This number, however, reflects
divergent rates of change in different parts of the world-a
decline in fatalities in high-income countries of
approximately 28 percent versus an increase in fatalities of
almost 92 percent in China and 147 percent in India. The
authors also predict that the fatality rate will rise to
approximately 2 per 10,000 persons in developing countries
by 2020, while it will fall to less than 1 per 10,000 in
high-income countries. |
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