Evaluation and Factor Analysis of the Intensive Use of Urban Land Based on Technical Efficiency Measurement—A Case Study of 38 Districts and Counties in Chongqing, China

Jingyi Wang,Kaisi Sun,Jiupai Ni,Deti Xie

doi:10.3390/su12208623

Abstract

Reasonable evaluation of the intensive urban land use has emerged as an important issue and hot topic for urban development. This paper aims to construct a unified framework for evaluating the intensive use of urban land and analyzing its influence channels. It combines the advantages of the approach of the indicator system and that of efficiency measurement, and provides an empirical test to apply this analytical framework using the panel data of 38 districts and counties in Chongqing, China, ranging from 2009 to 2018. To achieve our goals, we used the panel data model and stochastic frontier analysis (SFA) model with decomposed technical inefficiency. Our results show that: (1) the level of intensive use of urban land in all districts and counties of Chongqing is steadily increasing, and the gap among regions is narrowing, (2) all districts and counties of Chongqing face severe and increasing difficulty in improving their intensive urban land use, and, (3) currently, the degree of external dependence is not a stable influential factor for land-use efficiency and intensive potential in these districts and counties, and improving the land use structure, increasing population density, strengthening fiscal expenditure on education, and promoting transportation convenience can markedly reduce land use inefficiency and simultaneously increase intensive land use. In conclusion, the framework for evaluating intensive use of urban land based on the SFA model with decomposed technical inefficiency can better integrate intensive land-use evaluation and the factor analysis process, and retain the scalability of factor analysis. For all districts and counties in Chongqing, we clarify several effective channels to promote the intensive use of urban land, which provides reference and technical support for formulating land policies.

Highlights

To pursue a sustainable development has become a widespread consensus among global cities
We investigated the heterogeneous influences of previous factors via the division of the urban functional areas in Chongqing
With the help of the stochastic frontier analysis (SFA) model with decomposed technical inefficiency, this study provides a more objective analysis framework for the intensive urban land use and its potential evaluation from the perspective of input and output, but more importantly, the analysis framework integrates the exploration of influence channels of the level of and potential for the intensive use through technical inefficiency term

Summary

Introduction

To pursue a sustainable development has become a widespread consensus among global cities. Scientific and reliable intensive use of urban land can serve as the crucial principal to encounter the challenge and contradiction for sustainable urban development. Unreasonable management of urban land has caused blind and excessive expansion during the process of urban development in China, triggering prevalent metropolitan problems such as conflicts between land supply and demand, excessive occupation of arable land and destruction of the ecological environment [5,6,7,8,9]. The intensive use of land resources has, gradually become the basic requirement of intensive growth of the urban economy and the fundamental way of building a resource-saving society. As the essential work of the intensive use of urban land, how to evaluate that of the urban land has naturally become a research focus and drawn continued attention of scholars

Objectives

Results

Conclusion