Background – methodology The objective of this research is the correlation of road fatalities with basic social and economic indicators in the European Union. On that purpose, a database was developed containing the most recent data regarding population, road fatalities, gross domestic product per capita, human development index, unemployment rate and few other economic and social indicators for the twenty eight Member States of the European Union. Statistical models were developed using the method of multiple linear regression and applied for all countries tested but also for different groups of countries selected (north-western, eastern, southern countries).

Results The application of the models demonstrated that annual increase of GDP, unemployment rate and suicides rate leads to annual increase of road fatalities. Whereas road fatalities annual decrease is correlated to increase of the human development index and of the motorway network density. These results are broadly confirmed with some variations in the three groups of EU countries.

The sensitivity analysis demonstrated that the human development index has the most important effect on road fatalities annual change

Conclusions The findings of this research might be useful for decisions makers to identify the expected level of road safety in a region or in a country based on their macroscopic economic and social indicators, allowing thus to identify the separate effect of specific road safety policies, programmes and measures implemented.