Abstract
Frontier research primarily focuses on the effect of urban development models on land use efficiency, while ignoring the effect of new-type urban development on the green land use efficiency. Accordingly, this paper employs a super efficiency slacks-based measure (super-SBM) model with undesirable outputs to measure the green land use efficiency based on panel data from 152 prefecture-level cities for the period 2004–2017. We construct a difference-in-differences (DID) model in this paper to test the impact of smart city construction on the green utilization efficiency of urban land and its transmission mechanism. The results showed that: (1) The smart city construction significantly improved the green utilization efficiency of urban land, increasing the general efficiency by 15%. (2) There is significant city-size heterogeneity in the effect of smart city construction on improving green utilization efficiency of urban land. The policy effect is more obvious in mega cities and above than in very-large-sized cities. (3) The city-feature heterogeneity results reveal that, in cities with a higher level of human capital, financial development, and information infrastructure, the effectiveness of smart city construction in improving the green utilization efficiency of urban land are more obvious, and in cities with a higher level of financial development, the effects of the urban policy were more optimal. (4) The smart city construction promotes the green utilization efficiency of urban land through by the information industry development and the regional innovation capabilities.
Highlights
Green development is key to the transition of China’s economic development model, and it is an important part of enhancing high-quality economic development to realize the “Beautiful China” strategy, which is to achieve good ecology, economy, improved health, and people’s happiness
Smart city construction is a critical measure for improving the quality of Chinese urban development, and the development of a means to accurately assess the impact of smart city construction on improving green utilization efficiency is of practical significance
The conclusions of this study indicate the following: (1) Smart city construction significantly improves the green utilization efficiency of urban land, and on average, the improvement rate of green utilization efficiency of urban land is approximately 15%. (2) City-size heterogeneity analysis results show that the larger the city is, the more evident the impact of smart city construction on the green utilization efficiency of urban land is. (3) The city-feature heterogeneity analysis results indicate that smart city construction has a significant effect on improving the green utilization efficiency of urban land in cities with high levels of human capital, financial development, and IT infrastructure, and the effect of urban policy in cities with a high level of financial development is optimal
Summary
Green development is key to the transition of China’s economic development model, and it is an important part of enhancing high-quality economic development to realize the “Beautiful China” strategy, which is to achieve good ecology, economy, improved health, and people’s happiness. The excessive expansion of urban space has resulted in the conversion of a large amount of agricultural land into non-agricultural construction, urban development, and low land-use efficiency within cities [2,3]. China in 2004–2017, based on the 2012 China Smart City Pilot as the Quasi-Natural Experiment, use difference-in-differences (DID) method to investigate the impact of smart urban construction on the urban land green utilization efficiency and its transmission mechanism. The remainder of this research is arranged as follows: Section 2 presents literature review; Section 3 presents the methodology and data; Section 4 discusses the impact of smart city construction on the green utilization efficiency of urban land and the robustness test; Section 5 presents the heterogeneity analysis; Section 6 is the inspection of transmission mechanism; and Section 7 offers conclusions, implications, and suggestions
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