Railways play a pivotal role in advancing environmentally conscious and safe transportation systems, positioning them as a vital component of Europe’s future mobility strategy. This study tackles the complex dimensions of sustainability in railway transport by combining environmental impacts and safety considerations within a single, integrated analytical framework. We extend the variable intermediate slack-based measure (VSBM) model to incorporate undesirable outputs—specifically accidents and emissions—allowing for a joint evaluation of safety and environmental performance. The revised model is applied to assess the operational efficiency of 14 European railway operators between 2010 and 2018. Compared to conventional efficiency models, our enhanced VSBM approach provides improved discriminatory power and reveals significant changes in relative efficiency rankings. By integrating safety and environmental dimensions, this study contributes a new perspective on sustainable railway performance measurement.

This study investigated the tourism–economic growth nexus in the United Arab Emirates from 1995 to 2023 using VECM and ARDL models to capture long- and short-run dynamics. Structural breaks in 2008, 2015, and 2020, identified through Zivot–Andrews and Bai–Perron tests, account for major economic transitions associated with the global financial crisis, oil-market adjustment, and the COVID-19 shock. VECM results reveal three long-run cointegrating relationships among economic growth, real tourism receipts, gross capital formation, FDI, and oil rents, with heterogeneous adjustment toward equilibrium. ARDL results confirm a long-run relationship, with tourism receipts, gross capital formation, FDI, and oil rents positively associated with economic growth. Short-run results similarly indicate positive associations across these determinants. However, Granger causality results show that economic growth predicts real tourism receipts, while tourism receipts do not significantly predict economic growth, indicating a growth-led tourism perspective rather than tourism-led predictive causality. Structural-break interventions further demonstrate the importance of major economic shocks in shaping the tourism–growth relationship. The study contributes by integrating VECM, ARDL, Granger causality, and structural-break analysis within a resource-rich and rapidly diversifying Gulf economy. Overall, the findings highlight tourism, investment, FDI, and diversification as interconnected components of sustainable economic growth in the UAE.