Assessing the Determinants of Changes in Traffic Fatalities in Developed Countries

Road safety is a considerable public health concern around the world. National and local governments regularly introduce legislation or strengthen enforcement of existing laws to make roads safer. Although road fatalities in almost all developed countries have decreased over the past four decades, the rate of change has varied tremendously from country to country. The goal of this study was to provide a better understanding of the relative rate of improvement in road fatalities in different developed countries over the past four decades. Observations from 16 industrialized countries in a series of panel data models were used to create two indexes to compare how well the countries were doing with traffic fatalities at different points in time: the overall traffic fatality index, which was based on raw data but adjusted to control for structural factors that affect all countries over time, and the adjusted traffic fatality index (ATFI), which had additional controls for gasoline price, socioeconomic factors...