Explaining national road fatalities.

The purpose of this paper is to report on a model that can be used to explain the differences in road fatalities of individual countries. National infrastructure, transportation and socio-economic variables from international databases were considered as possible variables. The model was developed by means of stepwise regression analyses. It was found that the passenger car ownership is a better predictor of fatalities per 100000 passenger cars than vehicle ownership as a predictor of fatalities per 100000 vehicles. Many individual infrastructure and socio-economic variables have a significant effect on the fatality rate. The final model includes passenger car ownership, the Human Development Index (HDI), and the percentage of other vehicles as explanatory variables.