Government land control approach, industrial agglomeration, and urban air quality: Analysis based on spatial spillovers and threshold effects

Abstract

Local government intervention in industrial land concessions has contributed significantly to the country's miraculous growth during the past four decades, but there are concerns about its environmental impact. Assessing the model's impact on the Air Quality Index (AQI) is critical for China as it focuses, now, on sustainable development. We examine the spatiotemporal effects and pathways of land use regulation by local governments in China on air quality index. The data used are real-time air quality data and land transaction micro data of 282 cities from 2015 to 2020. The results demonstrate that local government use controls have a favorable impact on the AQI in the city and its surrounding areas. Land intervention attracted capital from low-tech and high-polluting industries to their more aggressive locations, triggering “bottom-up competition” in the industrial structure through the industrial aggregation effect. The study also found structural breakpoints in the model's industrial agglomeration effect. There are two structural breakpoints in the national region; the model's impact on AQI increases significantly after exceeding each structural breakpoint. At the sub-regional level, there are two structural breakpoints in the industrial agglomeration effect of the eastern and western cities; both weaken after exceeding the second structural breakpoint. There is one structural breakpoint in the central cities; after exceeding it, the model's impact on AQI increases.