Getting safer?
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Feb 11th 2017
GOING by the numbers, China’s notoriously hazardous coal mines have become distinctly less perilous in recent years. In January the government said that 538 people had died in mining accidents in 2016, a mere 11% of the death toll a decade earlier. The number of deaths per million tonnes of coal extracted was the lowest ever. For Chinese industry generally, safety data are improving. In 2002 140,000 people died in work-related accidents. Last year the toll was less than one-third of that. On roads there has been similar progress: 58,000 deaths in 2015, down from 107,000 in 2004. Officials admit the statistics remain “grim”, but their efforts to improve safety would seem to be paying off.
Perhaps, but the numbers should be treated with caution. A forthcoming paper by Raymond Fisman of Boston University and Yongxiang Wang of the University of Southern California analyses a government campaign launched in 2004 to reduce accidental deaths at work and on roads. It imposed annual ceilings on such fatalities, nationally and locally. Officials would be punished if targets were exceeded.
To see how this has worked, Mr Fisman and Mr Wang calculated the deaths-to-ceiling ratio (reported deaths divided by the mandated ceiling) for each province. It might be expected that most provinces would be close to the target—whether slightly above or slightly below. But almost all the ratios the scholars calculated were shy of 1 (see chart). This suggested fiddling—it was very unlikely that the government had set the ceilings too high. Safety standards, the authors conclude, have not improved as much as the numbers appear to show.
