Research on the impacting mechanism and enhancement strategies for the effect of safety regulation in Chinese coal mine

Abstract

Safety regulation in coal mine is a crucial approach to guarantee safe production within the coal industry. Existing literatures have largely concentrated on the internal micro level, for example within corporations, to find the reason behind coal mining accidents and propose improvement strategies. However, the systematic researches on the behavioral influencing factors of each entity and the interactions between different entities in coal mine safety regulation at the external macro level have been limited. Moreover, there have been many qualitative analyses and few quantitative studies. Considering these, this study systematically deconstructs the relevant factors and the interactions between different entities' behaviors, establishes a theoretical model of the impacting mechanism, develops a scale and uses the structural equation model to examine the interaction mechanism between public scrutiny, national supervision, regional surveillance, corporate responsibility, and regulatory effect. Finally, this paper proposes comprehensive strategies to enhance the effect of safety regulation in coal mines. The results are as follows: ① Regional surveillance and public scrutiny have the greatest direct and indirect impacts on the coal mine safety regulation effect, respectively. The measure of the overall effect shows that factors range from the most impactful to the least impactful; in descending order, they rank the following: regional surveillance, corporate responsibility, national supervision and public scrutiny. ②Direct intervention by national coal mine safety supervision agencies in ensuring coal safety is inefficient. These institutions should focus on regional coal mine safety surveillance directorates rather than on coal corporations. ③ Regional coal mine safety surveillance directorates play an important role in the selection of corporations’ safety behaviors. However, this impact is negative at present. Corrupt regulatory discipline and inadequate fulfilment of responsibilities are directly responsible for the frequent occurrence of major coal accidents.