A Two-Way Fixed Effects Estimation on the Impact of Industrial Land Supply on Environmental Pollution in Urban China

Abstract

Despite the great economic growth and fast urbanization process in the past four decades, China is now suffering severely from environmental pollution. Local governments’ industrial land supply behaviors have a great impact on local investment, economic growth, and environmental pollution, which has not been effectively evaluated. To fill this gap, this paper quantitatively investigates the impact of industrial land supply by local governments on environmental pollution based on a two-way fixed effects model. A comprehensive and reliable data set for 277 Chinese prefecture-level cities from 2009 to 2017 has been collected for analysis. The findings suggest that the increase of the ratio of industrial and mining storage land to total land supply significantly increases the concentration of PM2.5. The results remain significant and robust after a series of robustness tests. The negative impacts on environmental quality caused by differences in land supply behavior are greater in the central and western regions. We further explored intermediate mechanisms for the environmental impact of local governments’ allocations of industrial land. The findings suggest that greater industrial land transfer by local governments leads to an expansion in the scale of regional secondary industry and increases in local fiscal deficit. Unbalanced industrial development, insufficient corporate innovation, and insufficient investment in environmental protection will increase pollution. This study provides a reference for improving regulatory measures on land transactions and for formulating regional polices for environmental protection.

An Evolutionary Game Analysis of Heterogeneous Local Government Land Supply Behavior and Industrial Transfer Competition

“…On the other hand, through the bidding and auction market mechanism, local governments can compensate for the loss incurred by low-priced industrial land transfers with high-priced transfers of residential and commercial land. This supports all aspects of local finances, enabling urban expansion and beautification [15,16]. A comprehensive examination of theory and reality suggests that the development competition with land management at its core for Chinese local governments is highly complex.…”

The Impact of Market and Non-Market-Based Environmental Policy Instruments on Firms’ Sustainable Technological Innovation: Evidence from Chinese Firms

“…External factors such as administrative intervention and legal circumstances inevitably affect the emission charging system and are not mandatory, enforceable, and supervisory enough. For example, some local governments are oriented to economic growth, ignore pollution problems, and collide with enterprises [26,27] to introduce unauthorized policies and regulations, affecting sewage charges' impacts and aims. The effectiveness of the EP promotes sustainable development.…”

The Impact of Environmental Regulation on Hebei’s Manufacturing Industry in the Global Value Chain

“…The current literature is mainly about the effects of environmental regulation on the manufacturing industry and its subsectors at the national or regional level, or the overall manufacturing industry at the regional level, and there are fewer studies about the impact of environmental regulation on the GVC embedding of the manufacturing industry and its subsectors at the provincial level [10][11][12][13][14][15][16]. Therefore, there is an urgent need to bridge the gap and conduct studies on the position in the GVC of the 12 manufacturing sectors in Hebei Province, to verify whether they are affected by environmental regulations and how much they are affected.…”