A CENTURY OF ACCIDENTS IN THE ITALIAN INDUSTRY - RELATIONSHIP WITH THE PRODUCTION CYCLE

The purpose of this paper is to examine the fluctuations of accident f requency in the Italian industry during a period of time covering almo st a hundred years (from 1890 to 1989) and to examine possible connect ions with industrial production fluctuations. Notwithstanding the cons iderable variations of economic and social conditions and the increasi ng technological and scientific improvement, the number of accidents n ever drops below 110 cases per 1000 workers/year. We focused our atten tion on economic factors, which, especially over the long run, seem to be the most important, so as to set the basic trends in occupational accidents. A nice parallelism between the economic cycle and the trend of accidents has been pointed out, differences not exceeding 20% over the whole period of observations. This relationship affords the oppor tunity to verify that the factors influencing human safety conditions in industrial activities do not depend on technological development.