Using Weighted Data Envelopment Analysis to Measure Occupational Safety and Healthy Economic Performance of Taiwan’s Industrial Sectors

Li-Ting Yeh

doi:10.3390/math8091635

Abstract

The socioeconomic costs of occupational accidents represent an important factor in the safety and healthy development of a country’s economy. Insurance payments (which cover workplace incidents, such as wounds or illness, disability and fatality) can be considered a proxy for the socioeconomic cost of occupational accidents. Occupational accidents in different industries cause important variations in these three socioeconomic costs—for example, in their frequency and severity. One of the most commonly used mathematical programming approaches that analyze the performance of inputs, economic outputs and occupational accidents is data envelopment analysis (DEA), which has also been used in recent years to estimate the relative performance related to occupational injuries. This study measures the safety and healthy economic performance of Taiwan’s 17 industrial sectors by incorporating the varying importance of the three socioeconomic costs of occupational accidents into a weighted DEA Model. The empirical results demonstrate that integrating the varying importance of the three socioeconomic costs of occupational accidents in the evaluation of safety and healthy economic performance is very important. To improve the occupational safety and healthy economic performance of Taiwan’s main industrial sectors, efforts should focus on reducing fatalities, which are very costly. These findings could help Taiwan’s policy makers effectively improve their safety and healthy economic performance, based on the specific context of each industry, especially the mining and quarrying industry.

Highlights

Industrial occupational accidents are important factors to consider in the safety and healthy development of a country’s economy [1,2] because occupational injuries can result in considerable socioeconomic costs [3,4]
The use of the slack-based measure (SBM) model can simultaneously deal with the resource input slack and economic output slack and projects each inefficient decision-making unit (DMU) to the furthest point on the efficient frontier in the sense that the performance scores (ρ) of the objective function are to be minimized by determining the maximum of all slacks
This study proposes an approach that directly incorporates the different proportions of the socioeconomic costs of occupational accidents as weights to represent the varying importance of different categories of occupational accidents in the objective function of the SBM model

Summary

Introduction

Industrial occupational accidents are important factors to consider in the safety and healthy development of a country’s economy [1,2] because occupational injuries can result in considerable socioeconomic costs [3,4]. Some of these costs can usually be identified as economic costs, such as lost workdays or medical costs, while other costs are difficult to quantify monetarily, such as negatively affected market goodwill [5]. Labor insurance is mandatory in Taiwan and is managed and operated by the government It aims to protect the livelihoods of employees and their families and to promote social security. Injured employees might be permanently unable to work or to work for the same remuneration

Methods

Results

Conclusion