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1. Introduction
Occupational health and safety (OHS) has become one of the most important issues for all companies operating in various different industries. The main reason for this is that companies without an effective OHS management incur great losses in terms of finance, production and reputation. The OHS performance of a country is the value or a combination of different values that determine the total risk level of all companies in various industries in that country. Indicators that obtained from numbers such as number of fatal accidents (NFAs) and number of lost days (NDLs) are used to obtain such values (Rogers et al., 2019; Wegman and Oppe, 2010). The most important characteristic that these indicators must have is being able to be indicated as a ratio. In terms of OHS, ratios can be obtained by utilizing worked hours and/or employed personnel. By using ratios, we can avoid making decisions based on only occurrence results. For example, if only the occurred accident numbers were to be considered, then the workplaces that work for longer durations or employ more personnel will always seem riskier as they will have a higher number of accidents.
When the situation is reviewed in terms of OHS records, the fact that there is a lack of sufficient records makes it harder to compare countries’ OHS performances. Even the International Labor Office (ILO), to which almost all countries are a member of, does not have all the OHS statistics of all countries. Yet, it is quite important for a country to compare its OHS performance with that of other countries in order to determine its current standing and what it must do in order to improve it (Gigović et al., 2016). In this respect, the study aims to develop an approach to compare the OHS performances of countries without any subjectivity by using the recorded ILO data of countries that have no missing data. As such, a total of 15 countries that have no missing data for 20 different industries within a certain number of years were identified from the ILO’s recorded OHS data. It was determined that there was no loss of data for these countries in the period of 2009–2015, and the OHS data belonging to these years were...