Study On Total Factor Productivity Change And Convergence In China’s Transportation,Warehousing And Postal Industry

Since the new century,transportation,warehousing and postal services has achieved rapid development.At the same time,the negative impacts of economic activities in the industry on the environment has become increasingly prominent.Therefore,studying the changes and convergence of TFP in transportation,warehousing,and postal services under the constraints of energy and environment is of great significance to the green development of the sector.In view of this,this paper introduces energy and environmental factors into the analysis framework of productivity in transportation,warehousing and postal industries,and uses the Global Malmquist(GM)index and the Global Malmquist-Luenberge(GML)index method to measure the traditional TFP and green TFP respectively for transportation,warehousing and postal services of 30 provinces in China from 2000 to 2015.In addition,we conduct a systematic inspection of national and sub-regional TFPs for transportation,warehousing and postal services.Based on this,this paper adopts the convergence method to study the convergence of two types of TFP.The conclusions obtained are as follows:(1)The traditional TFP and environmental TFP in China’s transportation,warehousing,and postal industries both show an upward trend.Without introducing energy and environmental factors,the industry’s TFP will be overestimated.At the same time,the main sources of TFP growth in China’s transportation,warehousing,and postal industries is technical efficiency.(2)There are significant regional and inter-provincial heterogeneities in the two types of TFP in China’s transportation,warehousing and postal services.The σ convergence test results show that the regional differences in the two types of TFP in China’s transportation,warehousing,and postal services continue to expand.(3)The convergence tests find that the two types of TFP in transportation,warehousing,and postal industry in the country all have absolute convergence and condition converge at the same time.That is,regions with lower TFP in the industry show higher TFP growth rate,and each region approaches to its own steady state level.(4)The labor productivity and investment ratio have significant positive and negative effects on TFP in transportation,warehousing and postal services respectively.The speed of economic growth’s impacts on TFP in transportation,warehousing and postal services in the whole country and different regions are not consistent.The energy consumption structure only has a significant positive impact on TFP in transportation,warehousing and postal services in such eastern regions as the northern coast economic zone.