The Economic Burden of Road Traffic Crashes in Kazakhstan’s Major Cities

Abstract

Road traffic accidents create significant losses of public welfare associated with premature deaths and injuries, which necessitates their monetary assessment when justifying transport and social policy measures. The purpose of the study is to assess and compare the economic burden of registered road crash outcomes in Almaty and Astana and to evaluate the robustness of the resulting estimates to changes in key calculation parameters. The initial data are organized as a “city–year” panel of 18 observations, based on official statistics from the Bureau of National Statistics of the Republic of Kazakhstan, the Committee on Legal Statistics and Special Accounting, and the World Bank’s World Development Indicators. The methodology is based on the Value of a Statistical Life (VSL) and Willingness-to-Pay (WTP) approaches. The results showed that the total monetized burden for 2015-2023 amounted to 809.75 billion tenge in Almaty and 303.88 billion tenge in Astana, or 1.114 trillion tenge in the two cities. The estimated burden in Almaty was 2.66 times that in Astana. Depending on the scenario, the cumulative burden ranged from 776.58 billion to 1,590.08 billion tenge, while the higher losses in Almaty persisted across all robustness checks. The results confirm the importance of accounting for deaths and injuries in the economic assessment of road safety measures and in conducting a cost–benefit analysis. Thus, the city ranking remains stable across the checks, whereas the magnitudes of the decomposition depend on the initial administrative observation.