Analyzing the productivity of Korea and China’s road freight transport industry: A nonparametric Malmquist approach

1Asia Pacific School of Logistics, Inha University, Korea
2Department of Economics, Inha University, Korea
3Department of Logistics, Graduate School, Inha University, Korea

Journal of International Logistics and Trade

ISSN: 1738-2122

Article publication date: 31 December 2006

Issue publication date: 31 December 2006

95
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Abstract

The objectives of this paper are to estimate the annual Malmquist TFP(total factor productivity) index of Korea and China’s road freight transport with DEA(data envelope analysis) and to decompose the index into technical efficiency change and technology change. In the process of the estimation, we used labor, capital, and fuel as input factors and ton-km of road freight transport as output factor. The panel data of Korea and China’s road freight transport industry from 1985 to 2004 are used. The results of the analysis show several points. First, there was no significant improvement in China’s TFP growth before 1997, but there was continuous growth in TFP since 1997 because of constantly increasing domestic freight transport demand. Second, there was downward trend in Korea’s TFP, especially there was a large reduction of productivity in 1998 because of the huge reduction of road freight transport demand during the period of the economic crisis. Third, the technology improvements play a significant role in the TFP growth and the technical efficiency had negative effects on the TFP growth of Korea. However, the technology improvements as well as the technical efficiency had positive effects on the TFP growth of China’s road freight transport industry.

Keywords

Citation

Ha, H.-K., Lee, S.-W. and Cheng, Z. (2006), "Analyzing the productivity of Korea and China’s road freight transport industry: A nonparametric Malmquist approach", Journal of International Logistics and Trade, Vol. 4 No. 2, pp. 1-12. https://doi.org/10.24006/jilt.2006.4.2.1

Publisher

:

Emerald Publishing Limited

Copyright © 2006 Jungseok Research Institute of International Logistics and Trade

License

This is an Open-Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/) which permits unrestricted non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited


Corresponding author

*Corresponding author: Professor, Asia Pacific School of Logistics, Inha University, Korea, Tel.: +82 32 860 8232, E-mail:

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