How the Establishment of the National Civilized City Promotes Urban Green Development: From the Perspective of Administrative Competing Theory—A Quasi Experiment Study in China

Rongrong Shi, Dian Song (), Guoqiang Rui () and Hainan Wu
Additional contact information
Rongrong Shi: Business School, Soochow University, Suzhou 215021, China
Dian Song: School of Political and Public Administration, Soochow University, Suzhou 215021, China
Guoqiang Rui: School of Political and Public Administration, Soochow University, Suzhou 215021, China
Hainan Wu: School of Finance and Public Administration, Anhui University of Finance & Economics, Bengbu 233030, China

IJERPH, 2022, vol. 19, issue 17, 1-18

Abstract: Green development is the core goal for contemporary urban areas. It has become essential to explore new types of urban green development, and the concept of the “national civilized city” which is the most influential city brand in China, has emerged. Drawing upon the administrative competing theory, based on the panel data of 281 cities in China from 2000 to 2018, this paper employs a propensity scores matching (PSM) design and a difference-in-difference (DID) approach to examine the influence of the establishment of the national civilized city policy on the green development of prefecture-level cities in China. First, the result shows that the establishment of the national civilized city policy can significantly improve the urban green total factor productivity (GTFP). Second, the mediation mechanism analyses show that the establishment of national civilized city policy can promote cities to increase their investment in R&D, increase the financial investment in environmental governance, and optimize the industrial structure, which further lays a solid foundation for urban green development. Third, the heterogeneity analysis shows that the impact of civilized city construction on urban GTFP is different in terms of population and economic scales. The results show that the weight of environmental management and R&D investment should be increased in the evaluation index of the national civilized city, and the promotion of urban green development should be maximized.

Keywords: establishing national civilized city; green total factor productivity; administrative competing system; PSM–DID (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I I1 I3 Q Q5 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.mdpi.com/1660-4601/19/17/11103/pdf (application/pdf)
https://www.mdpi.com/1660-4601/19/17/11103/ (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:gam:jijerp:v:19:y:2022:i:17:p:11103-:d:906822

Access Statistics for this article

IJERPH is currently edited by Ms. Jenna Liu

More articles in IJERPH from MDPI
Bibliographic data for series maintained by MDPI Indexing Manager ().