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Investigating the mechanisms among industrial agglomeration, environmental pollution and sustainable industrial efficiency: a case study in China

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Abstract

Industrial agglomeration (IA) has greatly promoted the improvement of industrial efficiency (IE), but it has also brought serious environmental pollution (EP), which in turn affects sustainable industrial development. Therefore, this study built a theoretical derivation model including pollution output and used a vector error correction model (VECM) and three-stage simultaneous equations (3SLS) to explore the mechanisms among IA, EP and sustainable IE. The following conclusions were reached: (1) The relationship between IA and EP presents an inverted U-shape and is located on the left side of the inverted U-shape curve. IA has increased emissions of industrial sulphur dioxide, industrial soot and industrial wastewater pollutants, but is conducive to IE. Increased EP will inhibit both IA and the level of IE. (2) Both IA and low EP can enhance the level of sustainable IE. (3) IE plays a mitigating role in IA and EP; it will weaken the inhibitory effect of EP on IA and strengthen the impact of IA on EP. In the future, China should continue its industrialization process to promote the scale of IA and strictly control the discharge of industrial pollutants to reduce EP. Simultaneously, the government should encourage industrial enterprises to improve technological innovation to promote IE. IA, EP and IE form a virtuous circle that promotes the development of the industrial economy and optimizes the environment. This approach can also be applied to other regions to provide decision support for the sustainable development of industry.

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Availability of data and materials

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

Notes

  1. Ciccone and Hall (1996) established an economic agglomeration model in the paper "Productivity and the Density of Economic Activity". The model used production functions to show the effect of density on productivity, that is, the effect of agglomeration on efficiency.

  2. In Fig. 1, the solid line indicates the path of the influence, and the dashed line indicates the influence through the effect. Bolded places such as increase, constrain, reduce and decrease indicate greater impact.

  3. In Mainland China, there are three different names used for essentially the same administrative level: provinces, municipalities, and autonomous regions. For comparative purposes, these are similar in scope to US states. Presently, there are 23 provinces, 5 autonomous regions, and 4 municipalities in China.

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Acknowledgements

We would like to express our sincere gratitude to the editor and anonymous referees for their insightful and constructive comments. This work is supported by the National Social Science Foundation of China (Funding No. 21CJL015), the National Bureau of Statistics key project (Funding No. 2020LY064), the Chongqing serves the national major strategy to sing a good “tale of two cities” to build economic circle research (Funding No. 2020YBZX03), Chongqing Technology and Business University Highôlevel Talent Project (Funding No. 1955033). Especially, we would like to thank the experts who participated in the evaluation and improvement of this manuscript.

Funding

This work is supported by the National Social Science Foundation of China (Funding No. 21CJL015), the National Bureau of Statistics key project (Funding No. 2020LY064), the Chongqing serves the national major strategy to sing a good “tale of two cities” to build economic circle research (Funding No. 2020YBZX03), Chongqing Technology and Business University High-level Talent Project (Funding No. 1955033).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Research Center for Economy of Upper Reaches of the Yangtze River, Chongqing Technology and Business University, Chongqing, 400067, China

    Yi Ren & Chengqiu Zhang

  2. School of Economics, Chongqing Technology and Business University, Chongqing, 400067, China

    Yuan Tian

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  1. Yi Ren
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  2. Yuan Tian
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YR is responsible for conceptualization and supervision. YT analyses the theoretical basis of sustainable industrial development and is the main contributor to the manuscript. CZ searches for data, conducts empirical analysis and tests, and writes the original draft. All authors read and approved the final manuscript.

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Correspondence to Yuan Tian.

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Ren, Y., Tian, Y. & Zhang, C. Investigating the mechanisms among industrial agglomeration, environmental pollution and sustainable industrial efficiency: a case study in China. Environ Dev Sustain 24, 12467–12493 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10668-021-01971-3

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