A new cross-efficiency DEA approach for measuring the safety efficiency of China's construction industry

Abstract

Purpose

Safety efficiency is the key to balance safety and production in construction industry; but the existing safety efficiency evaluation methods have the limitations of overestimating efficiency and ignoring undesirable outputs; therefore, according to the characteristics of safety production in construction industry, this paper innovatively develops a new cross-efficiency data envelopment analysis method to analyze safety efficiency, which can solve the limitations of traditional methods; and then the safety efficiency and its influencing factors of China's construction industry are analyzed, and some useful conclusions are obtained to improve its safety efficiency.

Design/methodology/approach

A new cross-efficiency data envelopment analysis method with undesirable outputs is proposed; and the two-stage efficiency analysis framework is designed.

Findings

First, the construction industries in different areas have different reasons for affecting their safety efficiency; second, the evaluation results of global safety priority tend to be more acceptable; third, frequent safety accidents and low resource utilization lead to a slow downward trend of the safety efficiency of China's construction industry in the long run; fourth, construction engineering supervision, construction industrial scale, and construction industrial structure have the significant impact on safety efficiency.

Originality/value

Theoretically, a new cross-efficiency data envelopment analysis method with undesirable outputs is proposed for evaluating safety efficiency; practically, the safety efficiency and its influencing factors of China's construction industry are analyzed.

Citation

Liao, L.-H., Chen, L. and Chang, Y. (2023), "A new cross-efficiency DEA approach for measuring the safety efficiency of China's construction industry", Kybernetes, Vol. 52 No. 12, pp. 6379-6394. https://doi.org/10.1108/K-06-2022-0880