Research On Technical Efficiency,Technical Progress And Regional Disparity Of China's Logistics Industry

As a basic industry of the national economy, the logistics industry has important significance for sustainable and coordinated development of the regional economy. Presently, research on logistics industry reflects the trend of "the rationalization of enterprise supply chain regional logistics" in the academic circles. As the high logistics efficiency of the local enterprises does not mean that the rationalization of social logistics as a whole. Thus, it is a necessity that the rationalization of logistics is extended to the regional level from a single enterprise.Efficiency is the core indicator for measuring performance of a industry, technical progress is a decisive force in increasing productivity and promoting industry growth. So, the efficiency improvement and technical progress are the ensurence for sustainable development of the logistics industry. At present, research on technical efficiency and technical progress focus on enterprise level and trade level. research on technical efficiency and technical progress of the whole logistics industry from a regional comparative perspective has not yet been found. This paper is an attempt in this regard. The paper has examined the problems and deficiency of the relevant research by analyzing the existing literature, the follow four aspects were studied with the quantitative analysis of sustainable and coordinated development of regional logistics as the research purpose and technical efficiency and technical progress of the whole logistics industry as the research object:1. Aimed at the shortages of the traditional DEA approach, The Super SBM-DEA model was proposed, which was used to measure the level of technical efficiency of regional logistics industry based on panel data of 29 provinces during 1991～2007. The results show that: The Super SBM-DEA model is better than SBM and BCC model. Technical efficiency of regional logistics industry is declining, which is caused mainly by the deteriorating of pure technical efficiency. Most of the region changed from Increasing Returns to Scale to Decreasing Returns to Scale. Technical efficiency showed the law of diminishing from east to west, The efficiency gap between the Midwest and Eastern is widening. These findings indicate that the development of the logistics industry can no longer simply rely on a simple scale enlarging.2. The Super SBM-Malmquist model was proposed to measure technical efficiency change, technical progress and TFP growth. The results show that: the main source of TFP growth is technical progress, while technical efficiency change deteriorated the productivity, Which to some extent, validate and broaden the conclusions of the current typical researches. Both TFP growth, technical progress and technical efficiency improvement in Eastern are better than thoes of the Central and Western. These three aspects in Central are at the lowest level, which validates "the central collapse" on external environment, and shows the urgency of implementation of the rising strategy in Central region. TFP growth experienced the evolution process of a certain of V—shape, with the turning point in 1998. These conclusions indicate that we presently should focus on technical efficiency improvement in promoting sustainable development of logistics industry. In particular, the development strategy should focus on improving the management and optimization of the external environment.3. The evolution process and decision-making mechanism of regional differences of technical efficiency was examined using many methods such as statistical indicators, theβconvergence test, kernel density estimation and random convergence test. It shows that: the results of the above methods confirmed with each other, then the conclusion should be reliable. Different with the research focus on regional economic growth gap, as for logistics industry, absolute convergence and club-convergence do not exist in the whole country, absolute convergence was only found in Western. Although in recent years, continued investment has been made, but apart from a few developed province of the Eastern China such as Shanghai and Tianjin, most of the other areas has the serious deterioration in the efficiency of the logistics technology. The results indicate that there is a strong institutional barriers and technical barriers between regions. Technology diffusion channels, even in the eastern is not smooth. Obvious conditional convergence was found in the whole country after joining control variables as human capital, government actions, opening up and industrial structure, in which human capital and government spending changes significantly affect the convergence. This shows that with appropriate policies, central and western regions can narrowing the gap of technical efficiency with the east.4. This paper conducts an empirical analysis on disparities and the exogenous affecting factors of technical efficiency of logistics industry by using a single-stage estimation procedure of the stochastic frontier production function. The results show that: technical efficiency is overall low and in downtrend; there are expanding disparities between regions. the proportion of the state-owned economy in fixed assets and government intervention impede the improvement of the efficiency, but the negative impacts are gradually decreasing. human capital, opening degree have positive effects on the efficiency; in the central and western regions, there is an interaction between lower human capital and opening degree, which makes a widening gap of the efficiency between the two regions and the east. With the implementation of West Development Strategy, industrial structure has been become a significantly positive affecting factor in the west. there is "central region falling" phenomenon on logistics development environment.The above results indicate that in order to coordinat the development of regional logistics, the country on the one hand, need to regulate regional disparities through appropriate policies and increase the support to central and western for the development of logistics industry, so as to give full play to their " advantage of backwardness ". On the other hand, central and western regions should actively improve the logistics environment, enhance logistics efficiency, narrowing the gap with the east. In particular, Central regions need take the advantage of the rise of the central strategies to speed up the pace and intensity of reform in order to give full play to the regional advantages, forming an organic cohesion with the east and west.