RESEARCH ARTICLE
The Economic Burden of Road Traffic Injuries on Households in South Asia Khurshid Alam1,2*, Ajay Mahal3,4 1 Murdoch Childrens Research Institute, 50 Flemington Road, Parkville, Victoria, 3052, Australia, 2 Department of Pediatrics, The University of Melbourne, 50 Flemington Road, Parkville, Victoria, 3052, Australia, 3 Nossal Institute for Global Health, The University of Melbourne, 161 Barry Street, 4th Floor, Carlton, VIC 3053, Australia, 4 Department of Epidemiology and Preventive Medicine, Monash University, Level 6, The Alfred Centre, 99 Commercial Road, Melbourne, VIC 3004, Australia
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* [email protected]
Abstract
OPEN ACCESS Citation: Alam K, Mahal A (2016) The Economic Burden of Road Traffic Injuries on Households in South Asia. PLoS ONE 11(10): e0164362. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0164362 Editor: Rachel A. Nugent, RTI International, UNITED STATES Received: April 12, 2016 Accepted: September 24, 2016 Published: October 21, 2016 Copyright: © 2016 Alam, Mahal. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. Data Availability Statement: We obtained original data of this manuscript from WHO after signing data agreement. The data agreement does not allow us to directly share original data sets. However, researchers can request following WHO contact to access the original data sets: Mrs Sibel Volkan, Health Statistics and Informatics, The World Health Organization, 20 Avenue Appia, CH1211 Geneva 27, Switzerland.
Globally, road traffic injuries accounted for about 1.36 million deaths in 2015 and are projected to become the fourth leading cause of disability-adjusted life years (DALYs) lost by 2030. One-fifth of these deaths occurred in South Asia where road traffic injuries are projected to increase by 144% by 2020. Despite this rapidly increasing disease burden there is limited evidence on the economic burden of road traffic injuries on households in South Asia. We applied a novel coarsened exact matching method to assess the household economic burden of road traffic injuries using nationally representative World Health Survey data from five South Asian countries- Bangladesh, India, Nepal, Pakistan and Sri Lanka collected during 2002–2003. We examined the impact of road traffic injuries on household out-of-pocket (OOP) health spending, household non-medical consumption expenditure and the employment status of the traffic injury-affected respondent. We exactly matched a household (after ‘coarsening’) where a respondent reported being involved in a road traffic injury to households where the respondent did not report a road traffic injury on each of multiple observed household characteristics. Our analysis found that road traffic injury-affected households had significantly higher levels of OOP health spending per member (I$0.75, p
The Economic Burden of Road Traffic Injuries on Households in South Asia Khurshid Alam1,2*, Ajay Mahal3,4 1 Murdoch Childrens Research Institute, 50 Flemington Road, Parkville, Victoria, 3052, Australia, 2 Department of Pediatrics, The University of Melbourne, 50 Flemington Road, Parkville, Victoria, 3052, Australia, 3 Nossal Institute for Global Health, The University of Melbourne, 161 Barry Street, 4th Floor, Carlton, VIC 3053, Australia, 4 Department of Epidemiology and Preventive Medicine, Monash University, Level 6, The Alfred Centre, 99 Commercial Road, Melbourne, VIC 3004, Australia
a11111
* [email protected]
Abstract
OPEN ACCESS Citation: Alam K, Mahal A (2016) The Economic Burden of Road Traffic Injuries on Households in South Asia. PLoS ONE 11(10): e0164362. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0164362 Editor: Rachel A. Nugent, RTI International, UNITED STATES Received: April 12, 2016 Accepted: September 24, 2016 Published: October 21, 2016 Copyright: © 2016 Alam, Mahal. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. Data Availability Statement: We obtained original data of this manuscript from WHO after signing data agreement. The data agreement does not allow us to directly share original data sets. However, researchers can request following WHO contact to access the original data sets: Mrs Sibel Volkan, Health Statistics and Informatics, The World Health Organization, 20 Avenue Appia, CH1211 Geneva 27, Switzerland.
Globally, road traffic injuries accounted for about 1.36 million deaths in 2015 and are projected to become the fourth leading cause of disability-adjusted life years (DALYs) lost by 2030. One-fifth of these deaths occurred in South Asia where road traffic injuries are projected to increase by 144% by 2020. Despite this rapidly increasing disease burden there is limited evidence on the economic burden of road traffic injuries on households in South Asia. We applied a novel coarsened exact matching method to assess the household economic burden of road traffic injuries using nationally representative World Health Survey data from five South Asian countries- Bangladesh, India, Nepal, Pakistan and Sri Lanka collected during 2002–2003. We examined the impact of road traffic injuries on household out-of-pocket (OOP) health spending, household non-medical consumption expenditure and the employment status of the traffic injury-affected respondent. We exactly matched a household (after ‘coarsening’) where a respondent reported being involved in a road traffic injury to households where the respondent did not report a road traffic injury on each of multiple observed household characteristics. Our analysis found that road traffic injury-affected households had significantly higher levels of OOP health spending per member (I$0.75, p
