Abstract
Nowadays, the development of green economy and the improvement of environmental efficiency have been a hotspot in both academia and industry. Especially, the effect of the collaborative agglomeration of manufacturing and productive services industries on environmental efficiency has drawn attention from Chinese policymakers, during a critical period of industrial transformation and upgrading and ecological civilization construction in China. However, few studies have explored whether and how industrial collaborative agglomeration affects environmental efficiency based on population structure perspective. To bridge this gap, using the methods of the stochastic frontier approach (SFA), the moderating effect of population structure, and the spatial effect, and employing the panel data of 66 cities in eastern China during 2009-2018, this paper studies the effect of industrial collaborative agglomeration on environmental efficiency and measure the fluctuates of influence including population structure. The results show that industrial collaborative agglomeration has the effect of improving environmental efficiency, and both of them have strong spatial spillover effect. Direct effect of the industrial collaborative agglomeration is more significant positive than indirect effect. It indicates that the environmental efficiency is affected by the industrial collaborative agglomeration in both the local region and neighboring regions. In addition, population density, aging and quality play a positive moderate role by strengthening the spillover effect of industrial collaborative agglomeration, while the moderating effect of population urbanization is not significant. Then, the recommendations and policy implications to improve environmental efficiency are put forward based on the research results: optimizing the coordinated governance system of regional ecological environment, accelerating the innovation of industrial value chain, and promoting the sustainable development of industry and ecology with the advantage of population structure.
Highlights
Energy consumption and greenhouse gas emissions are the main reasons restricting the construction of ecological civilization in China, and important problems in the sustainable development of economy and environment (Zhang and Da, 2013; Zhang and Da, 2015)
The population structure as moderating variable is divided into four aspects: population distribution structure, population age structure, population spatial structure and population cultural structure, which are measured by population density, population aging, population urbanization and population quality index respectively, and they may moderate the relationship between industrial collaborative agglomeration and environmental efficiency
With the increasing downward pressure on China's economy and the tightening of resources and environmental constraints, how to achieve a win-win situation between the promotion of industrial value chain and the construction of ecological environment has become a focal point concerned by the government and academia
Summary
Energy consumption and greenhouse gas emissions are the main reasons restricting the construction of ecological civilization in China, and important problems in the sustainable development of economy and environment (Zhang and Da, 2013; Zhang and Da, 2015). The main way of optimizing the allocation of resources and promoting green economy is to build up industrial agglomeration areas, among which the eastern coastal areas of China are the first to reduce energy consumption and pollutant emission by making the use of manufacturing agglomeration and taking industrial parks and development zones as carriers, in order to achieve high-quality economic growth. Cities implement the policies to gather high-tech and educated talents, deeply integrate talents chain and industry chain in order to transform tradition manufacturing to green, intelligent and high-end They encourage the research and development of low-carbon technologies and strengthen the efficiency of clean energy in the development of coordinated industrial agglomeration, comprehensively achieve a green system based on resource conservation and recycling, and fundamentally improve environmental efficiency. Hypothesis 5. population quality can positively moderate the effect of industrial collaborative agglomeration on environmental efficiency
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