Analysis of fire protection efficiency in the United States: a two-stage DEA-based approach

Fire-related hazards and incidents are a very common phenomenon that affects human society heavily, so many organisations, over a long period of time, have made efforts to mitigate fires and the caused damages. It is widely acknowledged that an evaluation of fire protection performance is critical for such efforts. In this paper, we propose a new data envelopment analysis-based approach for fire protection efficiency analysis in the United States at the state level. For this purpose, the fire protection system is generalised as an innovative two-stage network process, in which the fire hazard defence subsystem in the first stage is followed by a fire incident fighting subsystem in the second stage. Further, both intermediate outputs and final outputs are all undesirable measures. The fire protection expenditure, a kind of shared resources, is modelled under managerial disposability since it can be intentionally used to reduce fires and fire damages. Based on an empirical study of data from 2010 to 2014, we find that: (1) Texas, California, New York, Florida, and Illinois are the top five states prone to fire incidents. (2) The United States as a whole has an average fire protection efficiency of 0.590, implying relatively low fire protection performances at the state level. (3) Wyoming, Vermont, and Rhode Island are the top three most efficient states, whereas Iowa, Arkansas, and Pennsylvania are ranked the least efficient. Further, (4) the fire incident fighting efficiency is more likely to be higher than the fire hazard defence efficiency for most states. (5) Looking at larger scale by grouping all states into eight areas, the Far West has the highest fire protection efficiency, while Southeast and Plains areas have the lowest efficiency scores. Interestingly, (6) the results show also that a 1% increase in the fire protection expenditure by states per capita will result in a 2.6893% improvement in fire protection efficiency.