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

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. 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 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. 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.