Research On The Impact Of Spatial Structure Of Urban Agglomerations On Green Development Efficiency In China

Green development is an important part of the new development concept.Urban agglomerations have become the main driving force of regional development and the main body of the development of new urbanization.In this context,exploring the impact of spatial structure of urban agglomerations on green development efficiency is of great significance for China to promote new urbanization and realize the coordinated regional green development.This paper focuses on the reality of the spatial structure evolution of urban agglomerations and the efficiency of regional green development.The influence of spatial structure of urban agglomerations on green development efficiency is explored from both theoretical and empirical aspects.Considering the problem of inequality in the growth of green development efficiency among urban agglomerations,the influence of spatial structure of urban agglomerations on the gap of green development efficiency among urban agglomerations is further analysed from the perspective of unbalanced growth.This paper measures the spatial structure index of 19 urban agglomerations based on a monocentric-polycentric research perspective in terms of morphology,using panel data of 19 urban agglomerations consisting of 208 prefecture-level cities in China from 2007 to 2020 as the research sample.Based on the Super-SBM model,which includes non-desired outputs,the Globe-Malmquist-Luenberger(GML)index is used to measure and decompose the green development efficiency of urban agglomerations.On this basis,the research hypotheses are empirically tested using the fixed effects model and sub-sample regression.The main research findings are as follows.(1)From an overall perspective,the spatial structure of China’s urban agglomerations is polycentric,and all urban agglomerations show a tendency to change to a polycentric model,but the changes in the spatial structure of urban agglomerations are relatively stable.(2)The green development efficiency of Chinese urban agglomerations shows an overall trend of fluctuation and increase.From the decomposition of the GML index,the average annual growth rate of technological progress is 2.49%,and the average annual growth rate of technical efficiency is only0.12%.(3)There is a linear negative relationship between the monocentric degree of spatial structure of urban agglomerations and green development efficiency.The increase in the monocentric degree of urban agglomerations is not conducive to the improvement of green development efficiency,indicating that the polycentric development mode of urban agglomerations will have a facilitating effect on the green development of urban agglomerations.This conclusion remains robust after replacing the core explanatory variables,replacing the model and using the instrumental variables approach.However,this conclusion suffers from regional,temporal and development stage heterogeneity.(4)The increase in the degree of monocentricity of the spatial structure of urban agglomerations will widen the inter-cluster green development efficiency gap and aggravate the problem of green development inequality in urban agglomerations.(5)From the perspective of the path of action,the impact of the spatial structure of urban agglomerations on green development efficiency mainly originates from technological progress and does not show a significant path of efficiency improvement.Based on the requirements of "green development theory" and the conclusions of the study,under the background of green development considering economic growth and ecological environment,this paper puts forward targeted policy recommendations with the policy objective of promoting regional green development.