• Energy Research

Performance evaluation in construction safety is of great importance to further improve upon safety management processes. This paper develops a data envelopment analysis (DEA) based framework to evaluate the construction safety performance at the macro level. The core of the method is to compare the output-input ratio of construction safety. Using the building practitioner, construction machinery and equipment, and construction area as the inputs, and value added of construction and death toll as the outputs, safety performance score is computed for the China’s provincial construction industries from 2009 to 2017. The results show that the number of benchmark provinces every year is between five and seven. The gap between the best-performing and underperforming province was relatively small in 2012 and big in 2014. Beijing, Qinghai, Hainan, Fujian, Chongqing, and Tianjin can be utilized as role models for the provinces that need to improve their performance in construction safety. The eastern region has the highest score in construction safety performance, followed by the western and central region. This study provides an effective solution to solve performance issue in regional construction safety and improves the tradition performance evaluation system to a certain extent.

Abstract The technology heterogeneity in the construction industry causes difficulties for an unbiased evaluation of safety performance. The non-parametric and two-hierarchy frontier data envelopment analysis (DEA) model was constructed according to the inputs and outputs of China’s provincial construction industry in 2017. Safety performance and its potential as well as undesirable output potential were analyzed from the aspect of technology gap and management efficiency. The results showed that the average safety performance in China's provincial construction industry was calculated to be 0.715, which was caused by technology gap and management efficiency. Northwest China has good performance in technology gap ratio and Central China performs well in management efficiency. Meanwhile, the strategies to improve safety performance in China's provincial construction industry were developed. In addition, potential of the safety technology gap and safety management efficiency took up 70.18% and 29.82% in terms of the undesirable output control. East, Central, South and Southwest China are the main areas needing to strengthen accident prevention practice. The findings can be used to help scholars understand the condition of safety performance in China's provincial construction industry, and provide guidelines to evaluate the performance in construction safety considering production technology heterogeneity.