A new inverse data envelopment analysis approach to achieve China’s road transportation safety objectives

The number of fatalities in road traffic accidents shows a gradual upward trend in recent years, and this has brought great pressure on the realization of China’s safety objectives. Meanwhile, how to make a scientific and feasible path for achieving the safety objective also poses a great challenge to the existing methods. Therefore, the paper introduces the objective constraint to develop a new inverse data envelopment analysis (DEA) model with undesirable outputs for ensuring the realization of safety objective under the current technical level. Subsequently, two safety objectives and two additional objectives are defined for China’s road transportation according to the actual requirements of decision makers, and then their realization paths are determined by using the new inverse DEA model, respectively. By analyzing the connections and differences of different objectives and their realization paths, some useful implications are summarized to promote the realization of the safety objective of China’s road transportation: First, identifying the requirements of decision makers is critical for making the realization path of safety objective; second, reducing desirable outputs, increasing inputs, and improving safety efficiency are the efficient ways to achieve safety objective; third, the influence of technology heterogeneity should be properly considered in the process of making the realization path of safety objective. In general, the paper provides a powerful decision support for achieving the safety objective of China’s road transportation.