Study the effect of industrial structure optimization on urban land-use efficiency in China

Abstract

Optimizing industrial structure plays an important role in changing urban land use structure and redistributing land resources among various industrial sectors, further impacting urban land-use efficiency (ULUE) and ensuring sustainable development of local industries. In this paper, we adopted the panel data of 31 provinces in China from 2000 to 2015 as case studies, and included spatially lagged dependent variable, spatially lagged exogenous variables and quadratic terms by combining the STIRPAT model with the spatial Dubin Model (SDM) together to reflect the time-lagged effects, pace-based correlation, and embedded complex nonlinearity relationship between industrial structure optimization (ISO) and ULUE separately. Leveraging such design, we first accessed the value of ULUE and ISO separately by provinces, and found interesting patterns in time and space. Temporally, the value of industrial structure upgrading (ISU) and ULUE increased gradually during 2000–2015, while the value of industrial structure rationalization (ISR) first decreased and then increased over that period. Spatially, ISU showed a strong geographical aggregation than ISR, the distribution of ULUE showed a “T” pattern from eastern to west in 2015. Then, we analyzed the effect of ISO on ULUE from three aspects, urban land structure efficiency, scale efficiency and intensive efficiency separately. Results show that the relationship between ULUE and ISO delineated as “U-shaped curve”. Among these, ISU has the greatest impact on land structural efficiency, followed by intensive efficiency, while ISR showed a U-shape distribution between structure efficiency and scale efficiency, but a reciprocal U-shape with the intensive efficiency. Moreover, the value of ULUE was affected by its pervious value, and the spillover effect of ISU stimulated the growth of local ULUE, but the ISR in the near province hindered the improvement of local ULUE. For the long-term development, it is necessary for the local government to make full use of their competitive advantages to attract more high-tech and low-consumption industries, and encourage a diversified industrial chain to speed up the agglomeration of factors in production. And it is also important to establish the coordination and interaction mechanism between west and east regions to achieve the dual objectives for ISO and ULUE promotion in China.