Appraisal Analysis of Social Costs of Road Accidents

The road accident is certainly one of the most dramatic events in theexistence of an individual, with important consequences to the personal and subjectiveperspectives, which are difficult to be quantified and surely not negligible,but also to the collective perspective, in terms of financial commitments that indifferent ways weigh on the whole society, for an event which only involved arestricted number of citizens. The quantification of the economic loss presentscomplex characteristics linked to the number of subjects and objects potentiallyinvolved in the accident, to be translated into the definition of a multiple function ofthe loss that connects the dependent variable (the loss) with the set of independentvariables ascribable to different cost voices linked to road accidents—loss of theproductive ability, human costs, sanitary costs, administrative costs, legal costs, andmaterial damage to third parties’ properties. The valuation of the aforementionedcosts supposes practical and methodological questions; the practical problemconcerns data availability, the methodological question concerns the tools. Theproblem can be solved within an evaluative perspective, after having defined thevaluation’s standards and the valuation’s procedures, identifying them among theones recognized by the International Valuation Standards (IVS). This work proposesto address the problem of the social costs of road accidents in evaluativeterms, defining first standards and procedures of valuation, with particular referenceto social costs from road accident related to human costs, both patrimonial andnon-patrimonial ones.