Abstract

Introduction: Traffic accidents are the ninth leading cause of loss of useful life in the world. The purpose of this research was to estimate the economic burden of accidents in Yazd in 2016. Methodology: This was a cross-sectional descriptive-analytic study. The study population included all injured people and victims of road accidents in Yazd in 2016. In this study, like other studies, the human capital approach was used to estimate the costs of road traffic accidents and the costs were estimated in two ways: 1- Based on the type of costs (direct costs, indirect costs); 2- Based on the type of outcome (death, injury, and damage to equipment). The costs were divided into two categories; a: direct costs (pre-hospital costs, hospital costs, physiotherapy and rehabilitation costs, property damage costs, administrative costs, and burial costs), b: Indirect costs (costs of lost income or lost potential production, lost potential production for the outpatient injured persons, lost potential production for hospitalized injured persons). Results: In Yazd, 278 people were killed and 107973 were injured due to traffic accidents in 2016. The total costs associated with these incidents were estimated at ($ 1004240) as equal to 16.439.168.647 billion rials. The results showed that of the total accident costs, 86.11% were direct costs and 13.89% were indirect costs. Conclusion: The results of this research showed that the economic burden of accidents in Yazd constituted about 18% of 59467 trillion GDP of Iran in 2016‎.