Has the manufacturing policy helped to promote the logistics industry?

The logistics industry is a derivative industry of manufacturing services extraposition. A variety of strategies to develop the manufacturing industry are important programs of action for China’s manufacturing strategic power, and it is of great significance to promote the high-quality development of the logistics industry. This paper takes strong manufacturing provinces with the development of the logistics industry as the research object and applies network DEA measuring the production efficiency and service efficiency of the logistics industry from 2004 to 2017. This paper adopts the “Made in China 2025” strategy as a natural experiment and uses double difference to study the impact of manufacturing policies on the high-quality development of the logistics industry. The empirical results show that compared with the Reference group, the impact of the “Made in China 2025” strategy led to a significant increase in the production efficiency and service efficiency of the experimental group. The group-based test based on innovation type shows that independent innovation has a significant positive effect on the high-quality development of the logistics industry, which shows that from the perspective of technological innovation, independent innovation is the main path of the “Made in China 2025” strategy to promote the high-quality development of the logistics industry. This paper not only identifies the causal relationship between the “Made in China 2025” strategy and the high-quality development of the logistics industry but also helps clarify the mechanism of how manufacturing policies improve the high-quality development of the logistics industry, which has important implications for further promoting the combined development between manufacturing and logistics.