Focus on the Economic Impact of Road Traffic Injuries: Selections from the Traffic Injury Prevention Special Issue

In 2009, Bloomberg Philanthropies launched the Road Safety in 10 Countries project, a five-year, $125 million effort to reverse global deaths and injuries from road traffic crashes.  The initiative is implementing 12 different road safety interventions in specific sites within 10 low- and middle-income countries.  As part of the project, which is the largest international road safety initiative undertaken to date, JH-IIRU has been tasked with monitoring and evaluating the interventions in all participating countries. Part of this responsibility includes examining the economic impact of the project, because, while it’s well-established that road traffic injuries (RTIs) are one of the leading causes of death and disability in the developing world, what is often overlooked is the economic cost of such a high burden of injury.

“Projecting the Health and Economic Impact of Road Safety Initiatives: A Case Study of a Multi-Country Project,” JH-IIRU senior technical advisor, David Bishai, along with colleagues from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, examined how many lives RS-10 can potentially save in selected sites, using two different economic approaches: Investment per life-years saved ($/LYS) and value of statistical life (VSL). $LYS calculations reflect traditional cost-effectiveness estimates. VSL calculations estimate how much society would be willing to pay to achieve the risk reductions promised by the RS-10 interventions.

The results of the study indicate that RS-10 benefits would have to be 20-fold less than those projected for its costs to outweigh the benefits and given such a high margin, it is very likely that RS-10 will be worth the money invested.

To read the full article and learn more about the methods used, click here: http://www.tandfonline.com/toc/gcpi20/13/sup1

As part of the Road Safety in 10 Countries project (RS-10), in 2012, JH-IIRU published “Public Health Burden of Road Traffic Injuries: An Assessment from Ten Low- and Middle-Income Countries,” a special issue of Traffic Injury Prevention. This landmark publication includes 11 scientific papers jointly authored with 50 colleagues from JH-IIRU and their in-country collaborators that contribute much-needed new knowledge to the burgeoning issue of road traffic injuries in low- and middle- income countries.