Efficiency assessment of Chinese logistics firms using DEA

This paper proposes data envelopment analysis (DEA) to evaluate the operational efficiency of three categories, and a total of 36 listed logistics firms in China. DEA‐CCR, BCC, NIRS and SUP models, including two groups of financial and non‐financial input and output measures, are used to discover the level and sources of efficiency and inefficiency of sample firms. The empirical results show that there are only one third of them with DEA efficiency value of 1, indicating that the overall efficiency of Chinese logistic industry is relatively low. And among three categories of service offerings, efficiency value of transporting firms is less than the average of logistic industry, with the lowest value for port firms, which can be attributed to scale inefficiency, mainly stemming from decreasing returns to scale (DRTS). Finally, the feasibility of DEA method of evaluating efficiency of logistic firms is demonstrated, and the related suggestions for efficiency improvement of Chinese logistic industry are also presented.