Safety at Work in Europe: An Efficiency Analysis

Keywords

Workplace accidents, Technical efficiency, Data Envelopment Analysis, Undesirable outputs

Abstract

Nowadays workplace accidents are more and more recognised as a social problem that has undesirable consequences on both human and organisations. As a result, there has been increasing concern in improving working conditions and in reducing occupational accidents in the European Union. In this context, this paper examines safety performance of fifteen European countries in four economic sectors – manufacturing, construction, distribution trades and transportation – by applying a frontier analysis method, Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA). A linear programming framework is therefore used to construct both constant and variable returns to scale (CRS and VRS, respectively) production frontiers which allow measurement of relative efficiency with respect to the number of workplace accidents.

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