Improving Road Safety
in the OIC Member States
64
Across the world, more than 200 countries differ widely in terms of population, population
density, geophysical nature, wealth, political stability etc. These factors all influence road safety
management and the ability to improve road safety. To account for some of these differences, a
common unit to measure road safety is risk, which relates to the number of deaths to distance
travelled, expressed in km. However, traffic data such as these are often not available and
therefore a more common unit for expressing road safety risk is mortality. This relates the
number of road deaths to population size, i.e. we use mortality rates, expressed as per million,
i.e. road deaths per million inhabitants.
It was recently shown that the value of a statistical life increases considerably with increasing
per capita Gross National Income (pcGNI) (Wijnen & Stipdonk, 2016). This suggests that high
income countries are willing to invest a higher proportion of Gross National Income (GNI) in a
safe traffic system than low or middle income countries. GNI may therefore be a simple variable
that may explain differences in mortality. Since GNI is related to population, it is expressed as
and average per capita GNI (or pcGNI) i.e. average GNI per inhabitant, expressed in US$.
In this report the 2013 road mortality and pcGNI for different OIC member countries and other
countries are analysed. The analysis is based on World Health Organisation data (World Health
Organisation, 2015). Although the WHO data is reasonably complete, there are four OIC member
countries for which no data were available. These are Brunei, Comoros, Palestine and the Syrian
Arabic Republic. These countries have been left out of the analysis. In addition to 53 OICmember
countries, 126 non-OIC countries have been included in the analysis.
The selected countries have been stratified into the three income levels defined by the WHO,
namely high income countries (pcGNI>12,745 US$), middle income countries
(1,046<pcGNI<12,745 US$) and low income countries (pcGNI<1,046 US$).
6.3 Results in Terms of Road Safety Performance
6.3.1 Mortality rates by income levels
As a first reference the mortality and income (as expressed by pcGNI) data for all countries for
which WHO had data available (126 non-Islamic countries and 57 Islamic countries) were
plotted . Mortalities range typically between approximately 40 per million to 400
fatalities per million inhabitants, which can easily be plotted with a straightforward linear scale.
However, pcGNI’s can differ more than two orders of magnitude: from less than 300 US$ to more
than 100,000 US$. The country with the highest pcGNI, Monaco, was left out of the analysis as
there were no fatalities reported in inMonaco in 2013 and also because it is a very small country.
Libya is not in this graph since it has an extremely high reported mortality rate of 783 fatalities
per million inhabitants.