The Relationship between Economic Development and Fatal Occupational Accidents: Evidence from Turkey

Abstract

Occupational accidents are among the most important issues of the agenda of working life in Turkey recently. Recently the causes and consequences of occupational accidents which are related to human, occupational and environmental factors have received great attention from the researchers but it has been paid little attention to focused on economic factors. The purpose of this paper is to make a contribution to redressing this gap by examining the relationship between fatal occupational accidents and economic development over the period of 1980 to 2012 for Turkey. In this context, bounds testing approach which is also known as autoregressive distributed lag model is performed. The results indicate the existence of positive relationship between gross domestic product per capita and fatal occupational accidents in the short-run while in the long run this turns out to be in a negative way via economic growth and changes in structure of the economy.

I Encuesta sobre Condiciones de Seguridad y Salud en el Trabajo para Ecuador. Principales resultados en la ciudad de Quito, 2016

“…Los factores de riesgo laboral presentes en los lugares de trabajo pueden tener una influencia significativa en la generación de daños a la salud de la población trabajadora. De la misma manera, producen pérdidas productivas para las empresas y tienen un impacto económico negativo que repercute principalmente en el crecimiento de los países de medianos y bajos ingresos 1,2,3 . Diferentes estudios consideran esta problemática, no sólo desde la perspectiva económica, sino también, como un tema prioritario en salud pública por los efectos negativos que suponen los accidentes de trabajo y enfermedades profesionales a la sociedad 4 .…”