The logistics industry is one of the largest contributors to global CO2 emissions, making efficiency assessment under carbon constraints essential for sustainable development. This study evaluates the logistics efficiency of 30 Chinese provinces from 2015 to 2021 by explicitly incorporating CO2 as an undesirable output. The super-slack-based measure (super-SBM) model and the Malmquist productivity index are applied to measure static and dynamic efficiency and to decompose performance into scale efficiency, pure technical efficiency, efficiency change, and technological change. The results show that static efficiency declined by an average of 7.8% after accounting for carbon emissions, with the largest reductions observed in Shanghai (-0.441) and Zhejiang (-0.203). Dynamic efficiency decreased in 21 out of 30 provinces, mainly due to slower technological progress. In contrast, southern provinces exhibit greater resilience under carbon constraints. These findings provide quantitative evidence for region-specific decarbonisation strategies in the logistics sector.
Ze et al. (Thu,) studied this question.