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Land misallocation and urban air quality in China

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Abstract

In China, the local government’s “land for development” strategy has led to a large number of urban construction land allocated to the industrial field, which has promoted the rapid development of industry and economy in the short term but also brought serious environmental quality losses. This paper systematically sets out how land misallocation works on urban air quality and employs the spatial Durbin model (SDM) to conduct an empirical analysis on the panel data of 283 China cities at or above the prefecture level. The result shows that, stimulated by financial maximization and political promotion, in order to obtain more fiscal revenue and growth performance, local governments prefer to allocate a large number of urban construction land to industry and related fields, which leads to the underestimation of industrial land price and the misallocation of land resources. Land misallocation has exerted significant inhibiting effects on the air quality of local and their surrounding cities through inhibiting the upgrading of industrial structure. Further analysis reveals that the bigger the city, the lesser the inhibition effects of land misallocation on upgrading of industrial structure and urban air quality and vice versa. The conclusions of this paper can provide a useful reference for local governments to optimize land allocation, promote economic restructuring, and environmental quality upgrading.

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Notes

  1. https://www.landchina.com/.

  2. As time series data of such indicators of most cities are evidently increasing, the paper adopts 0.6, 0.7, and 0.8 as smoothing coefficients for calculation. By comparing predicted standard errors under different smoothing coefficient values, the paper chooses 0.7, whose error is the smallest, as the treatment input’s smoothing coefficient value.

  3. Although regions with high density and more plan restrictions normally have a higher house price, a high house price may prompt a local government to acquire more extra-budgetary revenue through land misallocation. Nevertheless, as the central government continuously strengthens its effort to regulate and control housing prices, the room for price increases becomes increasingly smaller, and the room for a local government to gain land misallocation revenue from high prices decreases.

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Availability of data and materials

The datasets used during the current study are available from the corresponding author on reasonable request.

Funding

This work was supported by Key Research Projects of Philosophy and Social Sciences of the Ministry of Education (17JZD022), the National Natural Science Foundation of China (72073071), and Project funded by the China Postdoctoral Science Foundation (2019M650042, 2019T120409).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Economics and Management, Changsha University of Science and Technology, Changsha, 410076, Hunan, China

    Jianjiang Liu & Zhuqing Jiang

  2. Business School, Nanjing University, Nanjing, 210093, Jiangsu, China

    Weitao Chen

Authors
  1. Jianjiang Liu
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  2. Zhuqing Jiang
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  3. Weitao Chen
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Contributions

Mechanism analysis and policy analysis: Jianjiang Liu; construction and test and result analysis of spatial econometric model: Zhuqing Jiang; robustness test and further analysis: Zhuqing Jiang; mechanism test: Jianjiang Liu and Weitao Chen; data processing and index calculation: Weitao Chen; and writing — original draft: Zhuqing Jiang and Weitao Chen.

Corresponding authors

Correspondence to Zhuqing Jiang or Weitao Chen.

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The authors declare no competing interests.

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Responsible Editor: Ilhan Ozturk

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Highlights

• We explore the effects of land misallocation on urban air quality.

• We estimate the spatial spillover effects by the spatial Durbin model using the panel data of 283 cities.

• We investigate heterogeneous spatial effects from cities of different grades.

• Land misallocation can reduce the urban air quality of local and surrounding cities.

• Land misallocation lowers urban air quality by inhibiting the upgrading of industrial structures.

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Cite this article

Liu, J., Jiang, Z. & Chen, W. Land misallocation and urban air quality in China. Environ Sci Pollut Res 28, 58387–58404 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11356-021-14660-5

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11356-021-14660-5

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