National road casualties and economic development

Objective: This paper explores why traffic fatalities increase with GDP per capita in lower income countries and decrease with GDP per capita in wealthy countries. Methods: Data from 41 countries for the period 1992–1996 were obtained on road transport crashes, injuries, and fatalities as well as numbers of vehicles, kilometers of roadway, oil consumption, population, and GDP. Fixed effects regression was used to control for unobservable heterogeneity among countries. Results: A 10% increase in GDP in a lower income country (GDP/Capita