Factor Agglomeration And Regional Sustainable Economic Development Under Environmental Constraints

Sustainable economic development strategy is the inherent requirement of human economic and social development, and regional resources and environment is the basis of regional economic development. For a long time, China’s regional economic rapid growth is largely based on high consumption of resources and energy, the traditional model of development inevitably resulted in environmental pollution. The deteriorating ecological environment has become the constraints of regional economic sustainable growth. Exploring regional economic development path under environmental constraints has become the key issues of speeding up economic development pattern and achieving sound and rapid development of regional economy.Factor agglomeration is a unique mode of resource allocation in the context of economic globalization, and has a huge role on promoting local economic growth, but in the process of regional economic growth should pay attention to the coordination of the economy and the environment. Only to develop regional innovation capacity, promote regional economic growth model to change from material elements-driven into the innovation-driven, until achieve regional economic development. According to the breakthrough role of regional innovation capability on resource and environmental constraints on the process of regional economic development, regional innovation capacity as mediating variables, we along timing evolution path of factor agglomeration to regional innovation capability, to regional total factor productivity growth, analyze influence mechanism of factor agglomeration on regional innovation capability, dynamic mechanism of regional innovation capacity on total factor productivity, revealing underlying mechanisms of factor agglomeration on promoting coordinated and sustainable development of regional economy under environmental constraints from the dimension of time-space. The main contents and conclusions are as follows:(1) Define the connotation of factor agglomeration, the regional innovation capacity and regional economic development. Factor agglomeration is that various factors of production (labor, physical capital and human capital) relying on the economic activities of enterprises, by a certain structure gather in a given region under the guidance of internal expansion and spatial concentration of more businesses, and through effect of factor agglomeration enhance regional innovation ability, then promote regional economic development.Regional economic development is not only the quantitative growth, but also focus on the growth quality. Regional economic development are considered from three aspects:Firstly, the expansion of the regional economic scale and improvement of production efficiency; Secondly, the optimization of regional spatial structure; Thirdly, focusing on the application of green, clean technologies to the regional economic development, not damage the ecological environment. Regional economic development must rely on regional innovation capability.Regional innovation capacity refers to capabilities of improving the stock of knowledge and skill levels, innovation subjects of a certain area directly or indirectly involving in the production of knowledge or technology innovation, through integration and convergence of innovative resources. Regional innovation capability was analyzes from the four aspects of knowledge creation, knowledge acquisition, corporate innovation and the innovation environment.(2) Interactive mechanism among factor agglomeration, regional economic development and environment. The characteristics and advantages of the ecological environment through the mobility of factors and location changes determinants factor agglomeration. Factor agglomeration has brought huge economic benefits to gathering area, also brought negative effects to the ecological environment. Regional Innovation capability is the fundamental way to achieve win-win of regional economic development and environmental protection.Taking carbon dioxide emissions as an alternative to variable environmental pollution, this article measures carbon footprint of energy consumption, and measures density, location quotient and spatial autocorrelation of labor, physical capital and human capital, and found that labor, physical capital and human capital are highly concentrated and positive spatial correlated. This paper uses the Divisia index decomposition method to analyze the scale effect, technological progress effect, regional industrial structure effects and spatial structure effects of regional economic growth on environmental pollution emissions. The results showed that unreasonable of the scale and regional industrial structure is the main reason for environmental pollution, regional spatial structure play an adverse impact on the improvement of the environment quality; technical effects play a positive role on promoting the improvement of the environment quality.(3) Influence mechanisms of factor agglomeration on regional innovation capability under environmental constraints. Physical capital agglomeration shows the characteristics of capital deepening, but capital deepen promoting economic development can be established only under the premise of capital deepen promoting regional innovation capability. Agglomeration of human capital is conducive to the generation of trust and the spread of knowledge, especially tacit knowledge, resulting in knowledge spillovers. By building space knowledge spillover model, analyzes the effects of physical capital investment (capital deepen), agglomeration of human capital on the growth rate of the stock of knowledge, found that the agglomeration of human capital improves the regional absorptive capacity, increasing the knowledge spillover, investment in physical capital embodies the learning by doing effects of knowledge production, increasing the human capital and physical capital investment of the backward areas helps narrow of the knowledge gap, and the realization of regional economic convergence.This paper makes empirical analysis of agglomeration of material capital and human capital, the intensity of energy footprint and environmental regulation level on regional innovation capability using GWR model. The results show that capital deepen of physical capital agglomeration doesn’t transform into technology deepening, and not promoting regional innovation capability; human capital agglomeration significantly promotes regional innovation capacity; the greater intensity of energy footprint is, the greater constraints role on the regional innovation capacity is; Environmental Regulation dual effect on regional innovation capability, and current environmental regulation policy is not conducive to improvement of regional innovation capability, while incentives role of the pre-environmental regulation on regional innovation is highlighted to make up, even more than the negative effect of environmental costs.(4) Dynamic mechanism of regional innovation capacity on economic growth efficiency under environmental constraints. The growth of the regional environment total factor productivity reflects the quality of regional economic development. The paper constructs a mathematical model to analyze the dynamic mechanism of the regional innovation capability and the reduction of pollution emissions on regional total factor productivity growth. On this basis, estimate and decompose the technical efficiency and total factor productivity growth of Chinese provinces and cities using the SBM directional distance function and the GML index under environmental constraints. The results show that distribution of environmental efficiency in inter-provincial is uneven; technological progress and resulting in increasing returns to scale is dominate to promote environmental total factor productivity growth.On the basis of controlling of the industrial structure, foreign direct investment, the degree of market variables, using Tobit model to analyze the effect of environmental regulation, regional innovation capacity on environmental efficiency and total factor productivity growth. It was found that regional innovation capability has a significant role on promoting environmental efficiency and total factor growth rate; government environmental regulation is negatively related to environmental total factor productivity of environmental efficiency.(5) Endogenous mechanisms of factor agglomeration on sustained economic growth under environmental constraints. Constructing endogenous growth model that contains factor agglomeration and environmental quality, and using the Hamilton dynamic optimization model to solve the optimal steady-state growth solution, this paper discusses necessary conditions for sustainable economic development, and the dynamic relationship of agglomeration external level, consumer and environmental preferences, pollution emission density and the rate of economic growth. The results show that on the equilibrium path of sustainable economic growth, the greater the spatial externality of agglomeration is, the faster the rate of human capital accumulation is, the greater the density index of pollution emissions is, the lower time discount rate is, the greater the preference of environmental quality is, the smaller inter-temporal elasticity of substitution is, then the greater the rate of economic growth is.Using panel fixed effects model to make an empirical analysis of factors affecting regional economic development, the results show that physical capital agglomeration and regional economic growth show the inverted U-shaped relationship, excessive physical capital agglomeration hinders the improvement of labor productivity; human capital, gathering a significant role in promoting labor productivity; an invalid environmental efficiency significantly hinders the growth of labor productivity; only human capital agglomeration by acting on regional innovation capability indirectly promote regional economic growth. (6) Active mechanism of factor agglomeration on coordinated development of regional economy under environmental constraints. This paper builds a local spillover model to analyze active mechanism of external economies of scale effect of spatial agglomeration, which are demand related and spillover, and external diseconomies of environmental pollution, crowding on regional economic coordinated development. The results showed that demand related effects and spillover effects are gathered force, environmental pollution, crowding and other external diseconomies are dispersion force to maintain balance symmetric. At the same time, spillover effects can also be a force for economic dispersion. There is "inverted U" relationship between industry agglomeration and economic development. Due to spillover effects, the faster economic growth, the stronger regional external radiation, the more conducive to narrow the regional gap.Regional economic cooperation is conducive to regional knowledge spillover and economic radiation, but also it is an important way to address regional environmental pollution. Build a game model of regional economic cooperation to analyze the utilities allocation problem of regional economic cooperation and the formation of cooperation mechanisms. Local governments participating in cooperation brings incremental of the economic utility and loss of environmental utility, the difference between the two is the net utility of local governments participating in cooperation bringing to the union, allocating utilities of regional economic cooperation according to this proportion of net utility. The sufficient condition of formation of regional economic cooperation mechanisms is that utility of local governments participating in cooperation is greater compared to not participating in cooperation. Complementary of factors is a necessary condition for regional economic cooperation.Finally, results of based on theoretical analysis and empirical research, we put forward policy recommendations of promoting regional economic development from the improvement of regional innovation capability, the rational allocation of the factors, and improvement of the ecological environment.