In this study the economic factors affecting road accidents are investigated through the environmental Kuznets hypothesis (EKC) framework. Based on the hypothesis, the road mortality rate increases in the early stages of economic growth and ultimately because of technical progress, increase in the related investments, and improve in medical care, the road mortality rate decreases as the economic growth increases. Therefore, in this study the relationship between road mortality and economic growth is analyzed in econometric methods framework, OLS, for the time period 1971-2009. Results obtained from this study show that there is a relationship between economic growth and traffic fatalities, so that traffic fatalities have increased along with economic growth till reaching to a critical point, and after that will reduce. In other words, the same relation to the Kuznets inverted U- is shaped for traffic fatalities and per capita GDP relation for Iran. The other results obtained in this study indicate that there is a negative relationship between traffic fatalities with investment in transport infrastructure, improvement of health care and cultural indicators, and also a positive relationship with the number of vehicles per capita rate.
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