Severe land shortage causes a higher demand for domestic and foreign land‐intensive products. As a result, resource utilization, and related environmental issues, will increase in urban areas. To this respect, the analysis of the impact of environmental regulation on urban land use efficiency helps to identify potential points for interventions designed to ensure sustainable land use. This study first introduces a theoretical framework to investigate the micro‐transmission mechanism of environmental regulation on urban land use efficiency. Our profit decision‐making model concludes that the impact of environmental regulation on urban land use efficiency is influenced by changes in the industrial structure. Empirically, our preliminary analysis suggests that in addition to population density, both formal and informal environmental regulation can promote urban land use efficiency, with a significant spatial heterogeneity across the sample regions. Further, this study shows a remarkable double‐threshold relationship between formal environmental regulation and urban land use efficiency in China. We clarify and confirm that environmental regulation promoted urban land use efficiency only when regulation intensity was higher than 0.8612. Environmental regulation increased urban land use efficiency in high‐level industrial rationalization areas, whereas it had the opposite effect in low‐level ones. Furthermore, there was a clear marginal diminishing effect of the impact of environmental regulation on urban land use efficiency when the optimization of the industrial structure was set as a threshold variable.
This paper investigates how urban sprawl and the quality of economic growth interact and further studies the spatial-temporal decoupling characteristics of both. To achieve this, a framework was developed to better explain both the different dimensional effects urban sprawl exerts on the quality of economic growth and their reverse feedback relation. A sample of 285 Chinese cities (2003 to 2016) were analyzed, employing both a decoupling model and spatial correlation analysis. The findings indicated that urban sprawl and the quality of economic growth are related via scale, structure, technological efficiency, and technological progress effects. In practice, with increasing quality of economic growth, the urban sprawl index decreases at the national level. At prefecture-city level, the types of decoupling between urban sprawl and the quality of economic growth showed clear periodical and unbalanced characteristics. Furthermore, decoupling showed a significant agglomeration effect in Chinese cities, which is mainly mediated by the types High-High and Low-Low. This study provides a significant contribution to the relevant acknowledge system by providing a comprehensive theoretical framework toward an understanding of how urban expansion interacts with the quality of economic growth. Furthermore, their decoupling types and spatial differences that are critical for the urban sustainable development have been identified, thus providing several important insights for both academics and urban policy makers.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.
hi@scite.ai
10624 S. Eastern Ave., Ste. A-614
Henderson, NV 89052, USA
Copyright © 2024 scite LLC. All rights reserved.
Made with 💙 for researchers
Part of the Research Solutions Family.