Does Smart City Construction Improve the Green Utilization Efficiency of Urban Land?

Aiping Wang, Weifen Lin, Bei Liu, Hui Wang and Hong Xu
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Aiping Wang: Business School, Shandong Normal University, Jinan 250014, China
Weifen Lin: School of Urban and Regional Sciences, Shanghai University of Finance and Economics, Shanghai 200433, China
Bei Liu: School of Economics, East China Normal University, Shanghai 200241, China
Hui Wang: School of Economics & Trade, Hunan University, Changsha 410006, China
Hong Xu: Business School, Shandong Normal University, Jinan 250014, China

Land, 2021, vol. 10, issue 6, 1-18

Abstract: Frontier research primarily focuses on the effect of urban development models on land use efficiency, while ignoring the effect of new-type urban development on the green land use efficiency. Accordingly, this paper employs a super efficiency slacks-based measure (super-SBM) model with undesirable outputs to measure the green land use efficiency based on panel data from 152 prefecture-level cities for the period 2004–2017. We construct a difference-in-differences (DID) model in this paper to test the impact of smart city construction on the green utilization efficiency of urban land and its transmission mechanism. The results showed that: (1) The smart city construction significantly improved the green utilization efficiency of urban land, increasing the general efficiency by 15%. (2) There is significant city-size heterogeneity in the effect of smart city construction on improving green utilization efficiency of urban land. The policy effect is more obvious in mega cities and above than in very-large-sized cities. (3) The city-feature heterogeneity results reveal that, in cities with a higher level of human capital, financial development, and information infrastructure, the effectiveness of smart city construction in improving the green utilization efficiency of urban land are more obvious, and in cities with a higher level of financial development, the effects of the urban policy were more optimal. (4) The smart city construction promotes the green utilization efficiency of urban land through by the information industry development and the regional innovation capabilities.

Keywords: smart city construction; the green utilization efficiency of urban land; quasi-natural experiment; difference-in-differences (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: Q15 Q2 Q24 Q28 Q5 R14 R52 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (37)

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