Impact of extreme temperatures on the performance evaluation of China's work‐related injury insurance system

Abstract

With the influence of climate change resulting in more extreme days, a rise in the number of work‐related injuries could be expected. The literature has addressed the performance evaluation of a work‐related injury insurance (WII) system via a two‐stage structure with input/output correlation as well as the impact of extreme temperatures under different scenarios. This article thus evaluates the performance of a system comprised of operational and service sub‐systems under three scenarios of extreme temperatures and proposes a hybrid two‐stage dynamic data envelopment analysis (DEA) model with nondiscretionary variables for measuring integrated WII efficiency under the three scenarios. The results are as follows: (1) the poor performance of the operational and service sub‐systems leads to the integrated WII system's low efficiency for 30 provinces in China during 2010–2019, except for Zhejiang, Hainan, and Qinghai. (2) Extreme temperatures must be considered when measuring WII efficiency and its stage efficiencies, or otherwise WII efficiency and operational efficiency will be underestimated in 19 provinces. (3) The negative impacts of extreme temperatures on the efficiency of the integrated WII system should be taken notice of, especially for Sichuan.