The role of long-term relationship of economic development with road incidents in Iran

Road incidents and its fatalities are one of the challenges of human societies that which have imposed a high burden on the economies of some countries. The objective of this study was to investigate the impact of the long-term relationship between economic development and road incidences of Iran during the years 1394-1369.
The impact of the long-term relationship between economic development and road incidences of the transport sector is modelled using a vector autoregressive (VAR) model through the Microfit and Eviews softwares. To examine the reliability and accumulation of variables, the optimal lags, is determined. In the next step, the number of co-integration vectors of the model is determined; consequently, the optimal model is deduced. Variance decomposition of the forecast error method is used to study the explanatory power of the variations of the number of road incidences on the economic development of transportation.
The positive logarithm of the ratio of GDP per capita was 29.10 in the estimation of the model which suggests that economic growth (increase per capita income) has been accompanied by higher accidents in the road segment and also according to the negative coefficient of variation of the logarithm of the gross domestic product per capita, indicates that in the next stages of economic growth, the rate of road accidents decreases. the results also show that there is a significant and positive relationship (0.66) between the Gini coefficient variable which indicates income distribution inequality in the country and road traffic accidents. considering the positive coefficient of the length of roads in the country (0.53), it can be seen that this variable has a positive relationship with road fatalities toll. also, from the results of model estimation, it is concluded that there is a direct correlation between population variable (POP) and road accident rate (4.21), indicating that along with population growth, the number of road accidents has increased.
The results of the research indicate that Kuznets's hypothesis could be confirmed in case of Iran. This means that in the early stages of economic growth, the rate of road accidents increases and finally Due to technical advances, increased investment in related sectors and appropriate training, this rate reduces at the high level of per capita income.