주의노력과 안전사고 : 한국의 지역 소득불평등 영향을 중심으로

Improving safety is one of the most urgent tasks in South Korea due to a growing fear of accidents and an increasing number of accidents nationwide. The goal of this paper is, based on the law and economics view that accidents are predominantly determined by precaution effort, to identify the main determinants of accident fatalities, especially focusing on income inequality. As an intermediate mechanism between income inequality and safety, we attempt to strengthen the theoretical relationship by introducing safety investment (i.e., a proxy of precaution effort). We then test the hypothesis by analyzing a panel of South Korean administrative regions between 2000 and 2018. We find that major determinants of the accident fatalities identified in the literature have high explanatory powers in the empirical analysis that utilized Korean data. The findings were consistent when we estimated the equation with a different dependent variable (i.e., the transport accident fatalities that are a subset of the total accident fatalities). The estimates of the transport-related variables became more significant, reinforcing its empirical suitability. Finally, it is found that income inequality is positively correlated with the accident fatalities in all model specifications. The estimates indicate that an increase in the Gini coefficient by 0.05 could account for as much as 3% of the accident fatalities that actually took place in 2018. Our estimation results suggest that various policies are needed to handle decreased demand in safety investment caused by income inequality.