Improvements in medical care and technology and reductions in traffic-related fatalities in Great Britain

international data, perhaps because of the relatively high correlation with per capita income.
In our analyses we further examine infant mortality rates as a suitable proxy variable.

Increased numbers of physicians may also lead to better health care and shorter
waiting times for service. Both the number of NHS staff per capita and the number of people
per capita waiting for hospital treatment are readily available at the regional level and are
used as proxies in our analyses. These will tend to represent the level of resources devoted to
medical care, rather than explicitly to medical technology. Slade and Anderson (2001)
suggest that more physicians may be endogenous representing a preference for better health
care. While this may be true at the national level, we suspect it is less true within a country
such as the UK where most policies are set at the national level.

The length of inpatient stay in the hospital could be affected by many factors such as
better medical technology, reduced ambulatory care and efforts to reduce medical costs.
Weisbrod (1991) considers another element to be cost constraints imposed by insurance
companies that provide a financial incentive for earlier discharge of patients. Quicker healing
is also possible with improvements in medical technology, such as use of laser surgery which
necessitates smaller incisions. Noland (2001b) found that the average in-patient time across
countries was a statistically significant factor in explaining fatalities. Regional data on
average length of inpatient stay is used as a proxy in our study.

Data

Cross-sectional time-series data for the United Kingdom was used in our analyses.
This data was collected for all 11 Standard Statistical Regions (SSRs) of the UK (except
Northern Ireland) from 1979 to 1998. The SSRs are defined in Figure 1. The data used was
obtained from several sources.

Regional data on road accidents over 20 years (from 1979 to 1998) was collected
from the Department of Environment, Transport and the Regions (DETR). Over this time

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