Abstract
Industrialization and urbanization has rapidly advanced in China. Therefore, clarifying the relationship between industrial agglomeration and environmental pollution resolves questions if intensive or dispersed development should be adopted for the future Chinese industry or not. By distinguishing between specialized and diversified agglomeration, this paper adopts the threshold regression method to investigate the differentiated influence of industrial agglomeration stages on pollution emission reduction. This was based on panel data from 2003 to 2016 on 285 prefecture-level cities in China. The result indicates that moderate degrees of industrial agglomeration and suitable agglomeration modes are conducive for the reduction of pollution emission. From a perspective of environmental protection, the development of diversified agglomeration is superior to that of specialized agglomeration. Specifically, a “U-shaped” relationship was found between specialized agglomeration and environmental pollution, suggesting that the former first mitigated and then worsened environmental pollution. This staged evolution of diversified agglomeration exerts a more-complex influence on environmental pollution. The following policy implications have been proposed: The currently implemented industrial growth pole strategy in China should fully utilize the “self-purification” effect of agglomeration to achieve energy conservation and emission reduction. Furthermore, differentiated agglomeration policies should be formulated in response to various growth poles according to different stages of industrial agglomeration. In addition, efforts should be made towards creating an interactive early warning mechanism for the spatial distribution of both economic activities and pollution.
Highlights
The relationship between urban agglomeration and economic growth has attracted attention from academic researchers, but has become a major policy concern [1,2,3,4,5,6]
The “cluster life cycle” theory suggests that clusters at different stages of their life cycle present different characteristics in terms of resource allocation efficiency, R&D efficiency, competition degree, public facility construction, and inter-enterprise cooperation (Jircíková et al, 2013; Mads and Torben, 2013) [60,61]; this paper takes the dynamic evolution of industrial agglomeration into perspective and employs the panel threshold model to investigate the different pollution emission reduction effects created by the transition of agglomeration development stages
This paper introduces panel data of 285 prefecture-level cities in China during 2003–2016, distinguishes between specialized and diversified agglomeration, and adopts the threshold regression method to investigate the differentiated influence of the transition of agglomeration development stages on pollution emission reduction from the perspective of a dynamic evolution of industrial agglomeration
Summary
The relationship between urban agglomeration and economic growth has attracted attention from academic researchers, but has become a major policy concern [1,2,3,4,5,6]. Differing from localization economies (implying that firms can derive benefits from the presence of same industry firms in a geographical area), agglomeration suggests that firms can benefit from diversified economic activities’ geographical concentration in a particular area [7,8]. It refers to inter-industry externalities with an emphasis on city diversification across different industries and corresponds closely to the ideas by Jacob (1969), emphasizing the role of regional economies’ diversity [9,10,11]. Clarifying the relationship between industrial agglomeration and environmental pollution necessitates an investigation into the environmental performance of industrial development in China for recent years, and offers an answer to the question as to whether intensive development or dispersed development should be adopted in future or not
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