Appraisal Analysis of Social Costs of Road Accidents

Abstract

The road accident is certainly one of the most dramatic events in the existence of an individual, with important consequences to the personal and subjective perspectives, which are difficult to be quantified and surely not negligible, but also to the collective perspective, in terms of financial commitments that in different ways weigh on the whole society, for an event which only involved a restricted number of citizens. The quantification of the economic loss presents complex characteristics linked to the number of subjects and objects potentially involved in the accident, to be translated into the definition of a multiple function of the loss that connects the dependent variable (the loss) with the set of independent variables ascribable to different cost voices linked to road accidents—loss of the productive ability, human costs, sanitary costs, administrative costs, legal costs, and material damage to third parties’ properties. The valuation of the aforementioned costs supposes practical and methodological questions; the practical problem concerns data availability, the methodological question concerns the tools. The problem can be solved within an evaluative perspective, after having defined the valuation’s standards and the valuation’s procedures, identifying them among the ones recognized by the International Valuation Standards (IVS). This work proposes to address the problem of the social costs of road accidents in evaluative terms, defining first standards and procedures of valuation, with particular reference to social costs from road accident related to human costs, both patrimonial and non-patrimonial ones.