The impact of transport development on construction land use efficiency of shrinking cities in China

Abstract

With the development of China’s urbanization process, vacant land has become a critical issue in shrinking cities. Based on the panel data of 28 shrinking cities in China from 2006 to 2018, the impact of transport development (including transport investment and transport mobility) on construction land use efficiency (CLUE) was analyzed in this study. The results show that transport mobility plays a greater role than transport investment in improving CLUE of shrinking cities. Specifically, the increase of transport investment and transport mobility per unit will increase CLUE of shrinking cities by 0.01 and 0.1, respectively. Then, the shrinking cities are divided into three types, which include resource-based cities, post-industrial cities and less-developed cities. We find that transport development has the most significant impact on CLUE of less-developed cities while having no significant impact on resource-based cities. Finally, the results based on the mediating effect model show that the change of land use structure is the main mediating variable through which transport development affected CLUE of shrinking cities.