Abstract
Rapid urban sprawl is a key characteristic of the current urban land use changes in China. It leads, however, to inefficient land use and spatial imbalance. This paper conducts a quantitative analysis of the urban land use efficiency (ULUE) at a provincial scale in China, based on the SBM-GPA integration model, and using the datasets of 31 province-level regions (provinces, municipalities and autonomous regions) in Chinese mainland from 2008 to 2017. The analysis demonstrates that: (1) the proportion of provinces reaching the production frontiers is low, but there are possibilities to improve for the ULUE; (2) the provincial ULUE strongly correlates to the type of agglomeration characteristics, and the degree of agglomeration tends to increase year by year; (3) there are three types of clusters of provincial ULUE values: high, medium, and low; (4) the gravity center of the provincial ULUE is located in Henan Province, where values are relatively stable and limited changes occur. The novelty of this research is that it applies spatial modeling to characterize and analyze ULUE spatial and temporal variations and clusters in China. Practically, this can better support decision making in urban land use management.
Highlights
Urban land is the spatial carrier of urban economy, society, and environment [1], and urban land use efficiency (ULUE) plays an important role in sustainable city development [2,3]
Technical efficiency (TE) can be decomposed into pure technical efficiency (PTE) and scale efficiency (SE), TE = PTE × SE and TE is equal to 1 only if both PTE and SE are equal to 1, which means that this index is efficient
PTE reflects the production efficiency of input factors at the optimal scale of decision-making unit, and SE reflects the difference between the actual scale and the optimal production scale
Summary
Urban land is the spatial carrier of urban economy, society, and environment [1], and urban land use efficiency (ULUE) plays an important role in sustainable city development [2,3]. China has implemented different types of land use policies to enhance urban land use efficiency, such as the “Increasing Deposit linkage of urban and rural construction land” (“ZengJianGuaGou” in Chinese) (Ministry of Land and Resources of PRC, 2004), “Guiding on intensive land use” (Ministry of Land and Resources of PRC, 2014), “Provisions for economical and intensive use of land” (Ministry of Land and Resources of PRC, 2014), “Monitoring of intensive land use” (Ministry of Natural Resources of PRC, 2020), etc. One of the reasons is that since the reform of the tax sharing system in China, local governments tend to opt for policies that increase the volume of real estate projects in a largely uncontrolled and unlimited manner [4] The impacts of these include a continued rapid urban expansion [5] and a less efficient land use [6,7]. Such developments restrict the social and economic development of cities, because of the decreasing availability of land and inefficient use [9]
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