Correlation of Macroeconomic Variables and Traffic Safety in Malaysia

Traffic crash is the fourth largest contributor to death in Malaysia. The impacts of the traffic crashes have caused a huge burden to the country and society. Past studies have shown that traffic crashes have significant correlations with macroeconomic variables while there are very limited studies on this area in Malaysia. Therefore, this study aimed to investigate the impact of economic indicators such as GDP, unemployment rates, world oil price and USD_RM exchange rates on traffic crashes in terms of injuries and fatalities between the years 1982–2019. An Autoregressive Distribution Lag (ARDL) approach is used for this purpose. The results show that economic development has a positive correlation with traffic fatalities but no notable impact on traffic injuries in the longer term at p < 0.05. For the injury model, the oil price and unemployment rate have statistically significant negative impacts of p < 0.05 on the total injuries in the short run. The findings are deemed relevant as they shed some light on the policymakers in understanding the impacts of economic development on traffic safety performance in Malaysia.