Dominique Mignot (p)

Marco Modica

In a safe system approach (ITF, 2008, 2016, 2022): the role of the actors is central. First of all, we can obviously point to the need for a lead agency capable of initiating, financing, monitoring and evaluating road safety policies at different institutional and spatial scales.
The role of stakeholders is also important in defining actions and in their implementation. These actors can be institutional, private (companies), individual or community, press, non-governmental associations, international associations, higher education and research.
These different stakeholders are likely to be involved at different stages of the decision-making and implementation process of road safety policies and actions, such as
- Management
- production of knowledge and methodologies
- scientific legitimisation of measures
- training of managers in charge of road safety policies
- dissemination of good practice
- prevention among young people
- information for the general public
This initial list is not exhaustive and other roles may be highlighted during the presentation. These skills and capacities are necessary to develop the groundwork for long-term action in favour of effective road safety policies in each country.
The presentation is based on the following four cases that we analysed in detail for the report "The Safe System Approach in Action" (ITF, 2022):
• Bogota (Colombia): adoption of Vision Zero, which shares the Safe System approach, launch of a new road safety plan 2017-2026; the case of urban speed limits
• Ouagadougou (Burkina Faso): trauma research project to instrument data collection
• Mexico City: Adoption of Vision Zero, comprehensive road safety programme (2016-2018), example of safety near schools
• Pleiku (Vietnam): Slow Zones, Safe Zones (SZSZ) programme, project on school zones and speed limits, case of two schools
Other fields of study and lessons on the role of actors will also be mobilised in the work carried out in the framework of the European Saferafrica project (Mignot et al., 2018).
In the end, the objective of the presentation will be to demonstrate that for the implementation of road safety policies, as for other policies, any simplistic and/or techno-centric approach is doomed to failure, and that the recognition and involvement of key stakeholders is a factor for success.

Elena Ragazzi (p), Lisa Sella (p)

Dominique Mignot

Currently, there is quite unanimous consensus on the need of policy interventions aimed at promoting and improving occupational safety and health, but there is no convergence on the most appropriate way to achieve the goal. Partly, this lack of knowledge is due to the almost complete absence of evaluation studies on this class of policies. The European Agency for Health and Safety at Work (2013) underlines that the development and implementation of OSH interventions, including policies, programs and their effects, are not evaluated by means of rigorous and scientific evidence-based research, denoting a general lack of quality in OSH intervention. Even less evidence is available for incentives, which are seldom applied in this field.
This paper is based on the case of the ISI Calls, a program giving incentives to SMEs for OSH investments, promoted by Inail, the Italian national insurance institution. The ISI calls are implemented through the mechanism of the click-day, i.e. firms applying for funding apply in a precise time and are funded on a first-come first-served basis. Since the available funds are exhausted in a few minutes (or even seconds), the mechanism can be assimilated to a natural experiment, where the applicants that arrived too late to be funded represent our control group. So, this case study represents an unique evaluation setting, seen that the vast majority of interventions in OSH are in the form of overall regulation and lack then of a counterfactual.
In the paper we will discuss the main research questions to whom impact evaluation exercises can give answer, as long as the main evaluation challenges for which literature gives little guidance. We will give practical application to the presented arguments, through an exercise of impact evaluation based on the incentives given to firms that carry out investments to prevent occupational accidents. This is made possible by the access to a complex system of administrative databases, used by Inail to manage the ISI calls and the occupational safety and health insurance system.

Laurent Carnis (p)

Elena Ragazzi

See the extended abstract form

Ugo Finardi (p)

Laurent Carnis

Occupational Safety and Health is a relevant topic for both scientific research aspects and social aspects. The paper starts from a bibliometric analysis of world international scientific literature, based on a dataset of scientific publication, to argue connections between the evolution of on-topic scientific research and the social perception – also reflected in policies – of how safety and health at the workplace are obtained. Results show: a rapidly expanding field, witnessing the growing interest on the topic; a wide and intertwined international network of research collaboration; and the growth and decay across time of the attention of specific research fields towards Occupational Safety and Health, witnessing an evolution of the social perception and of the policy effort on the topic. Specific country-related research fields are also highlighted by the method-ology.

Paolo Bottero, Marco Modica (p), Giulia Urso

Ugo Finardi

The study of the economic consequences of natural disasters has traditionally focused on the assessment of the immediate direct impact of a different plethora of natural shocks on a set of economic variables (e.g. GDP, income, employment). Comparatively less attention has been devoted to the long-term and indirect effects of these catastrophic events.

Thus, we know relatively little about the long-run economic transformation processes after disasters at the local level, especially when considering permanent consequences on the local economies’ structure.
In more details, a critical yet underexplored research area in the field is how places respond to extreme events by adjusting their economic structures. Typical approaches focus on the recovery of given economic proxies to pre-disaster levels. This perspective can be useful when considering the short-term impact of such shocks. However, the socio-economic fabric is constantly changing to respond to modifications of the ‘external’ economic conditions, and this becomes exceptionally evident in the face of massive changes as the ones produced by unexpected natural disasters, in the immediate aftermath of the event, and especially from a longitudinal perspective.

This is a crucial issue since, after a natural disaster, the reconstruction process forces the economy to readapt towards a new equilibrium because of several factors: first, due to the destruction of physical capital, infrastructures and loss of lives; second, because of the reconstruction and recovery policies that can rapidly increase the capital inflows thanks to public and private transfers. Given these elements, disasters can be seen as speeding up a ‘quasi-Schumpeterian’ process of ‘creative destruction’ by removing bottleneck to the economic system or by restructuring the entire local economy.

Aiming at contributing to fill this gap, this paper investigates the impact of a disruptive shock, namely the 2009 L’Aquila earthquake, on the local economic absolute and relative specialisation in the long run, by using a recent development of the Synthetic Control Method (Microsynth), that allows a greater granularity of the level of analysis. We show that, although many economic indicators bounce back relatively fast to pre-disaster levels, the long-run consequences on local economic specialization can last for years as a combined result of the forces pushing the need for physical reconstruction and the envisioned post-recovery development policy.