How does new-type urbanization promote green development efficiency in China? The mediating role of governments, enterprises, and residents

Abstract

New-type urbanization (NTU) is proposed by China to solve unsustainable issues and improve green development efficiency (GDE) during the process of rapid urbanization. However, the impact mechanism of NTU on GDE is unclear. Using panel data of 282 prefecture-level cities in China from 2010 to 2019, we measured NTU and GDE to describe their spatiotemporal pattern and relationship evolution. The fixed effects panel model and mediating effect panel model were further utilized to analyze the benchmark impact, mediating mechanism and spatiotemporal heterogeneity of NTU on GDE. The results showed that NTU improved, with the highest levels observed in the eastern region, while GDE increased with fluctuations, performing better in both the eastern and western regions. With the proportion of double-high cities increasing from 13.83 % to 43.62 %, the NTU-GDE relationship was upgraded. Overall, every 1 % improvement in NTU increased GDE by 0.3111 %, and the enterprise effect, resident effect and government effect played a positive mediating role from high to low. During the later stage of NTU, its impact on GDE strengthened significantly, and the mediating role of governments was optimized. The eastern region was the only region with three positive mediating roles of governments, enterprises and residents. These findings will promote GDE through NTU in China and serve as a valuable reference for sustainable global urbanization.

Keywords

New-type urbanization / Green development efficiency / Mediating mechanism / Spatiotemporal heterogeneity / China

CRediT authorship contribution statement

Haitao Ma: Writing – review & editing, Supervision, Project administration, Funding acquisition. Kewen Wang: Writing – original draft, Software, Methodology, Formal analysis, Data curation, Conceptualization. Chuanglin Fang: Writing – review & editing, Supervision.

Declaration of competing interests

The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.

Acknowledgments

This research is supported by the Third Xinjiang Scientific Expedition Program (Grant No. 2021xjkk0905) and the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant No. 42121001).

Supplementary materials

Supplementary material associated with this article can be found, in the online version, at doi:10.1016/j.geosus.2024.10.001.

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