.Ninety per cent of road fatalities take place in low-income or middle-income countries where the situation is undoubtedly going to get worse in the short-term. Therefore, considering that it can be argued that in high-income countries the situation has improved in the past decades, the key issues of this conference arise: which first world answers fit third world problems?; and, how can their implementation be accelerated? In these regards, the following aspects have to be taken into consideration: there are great social, economic and structural differences among the many countries considered third world, much greater than the ones that may arise between first world nations. For example, it can be argued that key road safety issues in China are definitely different from those in Argentina or Brazil, whereas key road safety issues in Sweden are in a general way similar to the ones in Italy or France. On the other hand, most low-income and middle-income countries face in common several extremely important issues alongside traffic injuries -namely terrifying infant mortality rates and nutrition deficits; or very high proportions of population without proper access to running water, medical services, habitation or education. When these facts are pondered it can be stated that even if the many economic, social and structural barriers to successfully implement useful road safety policies could be sorted out, every action aiming at reducing traffic victims must be both carefully evaluated and managed to attain the maximum efficiency. In this way, higher benefits will be obtained out of very scarce resources. Thus, if the social and economic consequences of road crashes in the third world are to be minimized, a thorough diagnosis of each particular situation must be done, using hard facts sustained by reliable statistics that will allow both the proper establishment of the priorities and the assessment of the effectiveness of every selected measure. This paper proposes a general approach to the reasons that explain why Argentina has not been able either to generate an adequate road crash data registering method or to organize a useful and reliable road crash database. Additionally, some feasible actions that would allow reverting the situation in the short and medium term are discussed (A). For the covering abstract of the conference see E217780.
Abstract