TITLE: An investigation into road safety performance in Chinese provincial-level  administrative regions: Insights from the input-output analysis

ABSTRACT: Objectives:  Road safety is a vital public concern aimed at preventing road-related injuries and  fatalities. Assessing road safety status can be effectively conducted using performance measurement  tools, which help identify areas for improvement and guide the development of targeted safety  strategies. Methods: This study evaluates the road safety performance of Chinese provinces from 2018 to 2020  using an undesirable data envelopment analysis model and the meta-frontier approach to measure  input-output efficiency. Results: During the three-year period, two, three, and two provinces, respectively, achieved efficiency  scores considered as benchmarks. Clustering analysis grouped the performance into three tiers, with  Beijing and Shanghai consistently in the highest-performing tier. Provinces in eastern China  demonstrated relatively stable and high performance across all years. Meanwhile, Guangxi, Qinghai,  and Guizhou showed potential for reducing undesirable output by over 80% annually. Changes in  scores for 20, 19, and 20 provinces were driven by differences in production frontier technologies  over time. A comparative evaluation incorporating desirable output offers an additional perspective  on performance measurement. Conclusions:  This research presents a framework for assessing road safety performance using both  undesirable and desirable outputs and offers insights for policymakers to understand regional safety  variations under diverse economic contexts.

KEYWORDS: Performance measurement; road  safety; safety performance; safety  management; input-output

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/15389588.2025.2563595