RESEARCH ARTICLE


How Rapidly Do The Road Fatality Rates of 37 Countries Converge Over Time?



Yu Sang Chang1, Sung Jun Jo1, *
1 Department of Global Business Administration, Gachon University, Seongnam, South Korea


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Creative Commons License
© 2019 Chang & Jo.

open-access license: This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International Public License (CC-BY 4.0), a copy of which is available at: (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode). This license permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.

* Address correspondence to this author at Department of Global Business Administration, Gachon University, Seongnam, South Korea; Tel: 4173794438; E-mail: sungguri@gmail.com


Abstract

Background:

Road crashes kill about 1.3 million people worldwide every year and severely injure an estimated 50 million. This paper examined two associated questions of convergence as to whether countries with initially high fatality rates tend to improve faster catch-up. Also, it was examined whether dispersion of road fatality rates among countries decreased over time.

Methods:

Using γ convergence and σ convergence, a total of 37 countries with reliable fatality data from 1994 to 2015 were analyzed. Common measures of dispersion include the standard deviation or coefficient of variation. For σ convergence, coefficient of variation was selected.

Results:

Results indicate that statistically valid patterns of convergence toward both catch-up effect and reduction of dispersion exist for the total group of countries. However, a wide variation in the pattern and speed of convergence was discovered for the subgroups of countries categorized by income level and regions.

Conclusion:

Convergence method helps to identify the most appropriate reference group for a given country in planning future goals for improving road fatality rate and catch-up speed. The findings from this research indicate that the speed of catch-up among different subgroups of countries varied.

Keywords: Road fatality rate, Convergence analysis, Catchup effect, Reduction of dispersion, Sigma index, Gamma index, Road crashes.