The role of China’s national logistics hubs in promoting green logistics efficiency: spillover effects and endogenous heterogeneity

The logistics sector is a major pollution emitter, emphasizing the urgent need for transition to green logistics. We first employ the slacks-based measure (SBM) combined with data envelopment analysis (DEA) model to measure 298 Chinese cities’ green logistics efficiency (GLE). Then, we investigate the role of China’s logistics hub construction (LHC) project in shaping GLE using various difference-in-differences (DID) estimators, such as spatial DID (SDID) and decomposed SDID models. Our findings reveal that it has significantly improved urban GLE through both direct and spillover effects. We find that infrastructure-focused hubs generate a positive indirect effect in economically comparable cities, whereas service-focused hubs yield spatial benefits for geographically adjacent cities. Additionally, we identify a more pronounced spillover effect on neighbouring non-treated cities. By addressing the two sources of heterogeneity, this study contributes to a systematic understanding of how hub characteristics and geographic factors influence GLE.