The Linkage Mechanism Research Between Logistics Competitiveness And Regional Economic Development

With China’s economic transformation and upgrading, as a fusion oftransportation, warehousing and forwarding industry and information industry,logistics industry plays a very important role in promoting the optimization ofindustrial structure. In recent years, the central and local governments have issued aseries of logistics industry supporting policies, but compared to the foreign developedcountries, China’s logistics industry is still in low level. However,scholars usingdifferent measurement models had given different conclusions about the interactiverelationship between logistics industry and regional economic development. Atpresent, the research for the competitionof logistics and regional economicdevelopment are mainly conducted from two aspects: the first is to construct logisticscompetitiveness indicators as should include logistics competitiveness level indexesand secondary indicators; the second is to be using time series model and regressionanalysis to study the relation among the indexes of logistics and gross domesticproduct.Based on the previous research results, this paper constructs threecomprehensive indicators about logistics competitiveness, opening rate and theregional economic development about the26-year panel data of5coastal provincesand also analyzes the linkage mechanism between logistics competitiveness andregional economic development using newly-developed panel VAR model. PanelVAR model integrates the advantages of the time series model and panel data, and isable to reflect the individual differences among the five coastal provinces, and alsodifferences along the time. At the same time, the influence of logisticscompetitiveness on the development of regional economy won’t be shownimmediately; there is a certain time lag effect. With these considerations, panel VARmodel is more practical."Logistics promote theory” believes the development of logistics industry wouldbe promoted the development of regional economy, while "pull economic theory"argues that economic growth leads to a big demand for logistics, so as to promote thedevelopment of the logistics industry. Empirical study based on the five coastal provinces shows that "logistics promote theory" is confirmed, and "pull economictheory" not. The reason is that development strategies which wereguided by exportingin long time, and exceeding investment that is imported into manufacture industry,and ignoring the investment of logistics industry. This paper is proposed that logisticsindustry and manufacture industry require linkage development to realize the entirelysteady development of regional economy.