Can Market Reforms Curb the Expansion of Industrial Land?—Based on the Panel Data Analysis of Five National-Level Urban Agglomerations

Wenfang Pu and Anlu Zhang
Additional contact information
Wenfang Pu: College of Land Management, Huazhong Agricultural University, No. 1 Shizishan St., Hongshan District, Wuhan 430070, China
Anlu Zhang: College of Land Management, Huazhong Agricultural University, No. 1 Shizishan St., Hongshan District, Wuhan 430070, China

Sustainability, 2021, vol. 13, issue 8, 1-21

Abstract: As China entered marketization in the late 1980s, it soon established a market economy system and implemented tax-sharing reforms. Driven by the marketization, local governments have rapidly developed the economy under the pressure of fiscal competition caused by the reform of the tax-sharing system. Industrial land is an important factor of local economic development, and it enables local governments to invest heavily in the industrial sector to promote economic development, leading to urban expansion. In order to shed light on the relationship between the market reforms implemented by the Chinese government and the expansion of urban industrial land, this paper used the data of 77 prefecture-level cities in China’s five national-level urban agglomerations as research samples from 2007 to 2018. We first constructed the marketization rate of industrial land (MIL) and used the panel data model to examine whether China′s market reform will curb the expansion of industrial land. The results showed that: (1) land market reform can restrain the scale of industrial land expansion, and the impact is different in different urban agglomerations; (2) under the effect of marketization, foreign direct investment (FDI) has restrained the expansion of industrial land to a certain extent. The amount of industrial investment (AII), the ratio of secondary industry to GDP structure (RSG), and the number of industrial enterprises (NIE) will aggravate the expansion of industrial land. We suggest that the Chinese government should deepen the reform of land marketization and develop a differentiated land market mechanism. It is also necessary for local governments to develop stock land, improve the efficiency of industrial land use, increase the investment in advanced technology, and improve the intensive utilization of industrial land. The research provides a reference for other countries in the world that are developing in a transitional period to restrain unlimited land expansion and save land resources in the process of economic development.

Keywords: land market reform; marketization rate of industrial land (MIL); industrial land expansion; panel data; national-level city agglomeration (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: O13 Q Q0 Q2 Q3 Q5 Q56 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/13/8/4472/pdf (application/pdf)
https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/13/8/4472/ (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:jsusta:v:13:y:2021:i:8:p:4472-:d:537658

Access Statistics for this article

Sustainability is currently edited by Ms. Alexandra Wu

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