What does the research show?
Workers in lower-income countries are more than twice as likely to suffer a serious injury at work as workers in higher-income countries. That is the finding of Danger on the job: how global inequality shapes workplace harm, a report by the UK safety organisation RoSPA (Royal Society for the Prevention of Accidents), published on 24 September 2026 and funded by the Lloyd’s Register Foundation. The analysis draws on the Lloyd’s Register Foundation World Risk Poll 2023, a global survey of risk perception.
Worldwide, an estimated 395 million people are injured at work every year. According to the report, around 6 percent of global gross domestic product was lost in 2019 to occupational accidents and diseases — more than the total economic output of countries such as Singapore or the United Arab Emirates. If lower-income countries reached the same safety levels as higher-income countries, the researchers estimate that up to 2 million lives and more than $750 billion in economic damage could be saved each year.
The report also maps regional differences, based on the six WHO regions. The share of people who say they have been injured at work themselves, or know someone who has in the past two years, is highest in the Western Pacific (37%), followed by Africa (31%) and South-East Asia (30%). In the Eastern Mediterranean and the Americas the figures are 22% and 21% respectively, and 21% in Europe. Wealth levels vary widely within each region, so these regional figures are not a direct comparison between lower-income and higher-income countries.
Why is the risk higher?
According to the researchers, national wealth is the strongest predictor of workplace safety — stronger than individual factors such as a worker’s own income, education or gender. This also shows in how much personal advancement helps: someone who moves from the poorest to the richest households within a low-income country sees their injury risk fall by only 18%, while the same move within a high-income country cuts the risk by 38%. Individual progress therefore offers far less protection in lower-income countries than in higher-income countries.
The report points to a lack of preparation and protection: worldwide, more than 60% of workers have never received any workplace safety training, and fewer than half of ILO member states have an up-to-date occupational safety policy. RoSPA and the Lloyd’s Register Foundation are calling for stronger workplace safety systems, better reporting and data collection, responsible global supply chains, and greater protection for workers in the informal economy.
Context
These figures align with earlier joint estimates from the World Health Organization (WHO) and the International Labour Organization (ILO), which calculated in 2021 that 1.9 million people died from work-related causes in 2016, 81% of them from non-communicable diseases. That analysis, covering 2000-2016, also found a disproportionately high number of work-related deaths in South-East Asia and the Western Pacific — the same regions identified as hardest hit in the RoSPA report.
Source: People in Poorer Countries Face Double the Risk of Workplace Accident, 30 September 2026
Also researched: RoSPA report “Danger on the job: how global inequality shapes workplace harm” (24 September 2026, data: Lloyd’s Register Foundation World Risk Poll 2023); WHO/ILO Joint Estimates of the work-related burden of disease and injury (2021)
