The failure of collaborative agglomeration: From the perspective of industrial pollution emission

Abstract

The green transformation of economic growth mode is one of the keys to promote high-quality development. This paper starts with the collaborative agglomeration of manufacturing and producer services, demonstrates the impact of collaborative agglomeration on industrial pollution emission through theoretical analysis, and then uses panel data of 285 prefecture level cities in China from 2004 to 2019 to verify the relationship between them. The results show that collaborative agglomeration significantly increased industrial pollution emission, but the effect mainly existed in small and medium-sized cities, cities with more development zones, cities with provincial high-tech industrial parks and the observation range from 2009 to 2015. The results of subdividing producer services show that transportation, warehousing and postal services, finance, information transmission, computer services and software industries have intensified industrial pollution emission in the collaborative agglomeration with the manufacturing industry. Mechanism analysis shows that collaborative agglomeration fosters the city's “low-level innovation preference” and promotes the expansion of the number of enterprises characterized by the entry and extension of the duration of highly polluting enterprises. It objectively forms a “quantity-priority orientation”, thus increasing industrial pollution emission. The above conclusions mean that the development of urban industry at this stage should be based on quality and efficiency, rather than pursuing the disordered expansion of quantity. This paper provides beneficial policy implications for reducing local governments' blind behavior and awakening the awareness of environment-friendly economic growth.