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

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.