Fatality rates as a measure of accident activity in developing countries.

Motor vehicle- related fatality rates in developing countries frequently exceed those of the industrialized nations on both a population and per- vehicle basis. The reasons why this is so are not well understood. The premise of this paper is that crash severity is a primary factor in the elevated motor vehicle related fatality rates reported for developing countries. Fatality rates (fatalities per registered vehicle or per 100. 000 population) are extensively used to measure and compare the relative safety of countries. This aggregates the effects of acciden occurrence and crash severity, masking the effects of severity factors.