Asymmetric Impact Of New-type Urbanization On Energy Efficiency In China

How to promote the green transformation of the global economy and the highquality development of the Chinese economy is an urgent and realistic problem.As an important carrier of economic and social development,the high-quality development of cities directly and profoundly affects the effectiveness of green transformation.Since the reform and opening-up,China’s economic growth-oriented urbanization mode has created a “growth miracle”,but also led to a large amount of energy consumption and severe environmental degradation.Aiming for high-quality development,the “14th Five-Year Plan” period is a key development period to achieve the goal of “peak carbon dioxide emissions and carbon neutrality”.Improving energy efficiency is directly related to whether the goal of “peak carbon dioxide emissions and carbon neutrality”can be achieved on schedule,and the key lies in exploring a sustainable urbanization development mode.“The National New-type Urbanization Plan(2014-2020)” issued by the State Council of China puts forward new-type urbanization as a national strategy,and requires gradually promoting the construction of new-type urbanization across the country.The “14th Five-Year Plan” clarifies the main tasks of improving the new-type urbanization strategy and the quality of urbanization,and proposes to accelerate the green transformation,which provides a direction for further promoting new-type urbanization.Although the existing literature has carried out fruitful research on the relationship between urbanization and energy,it has not systematically revealed the impact mechanism,effect,and heterogeneity of new-type urbanization on energy efficiency,nor has it evaluated the effect of new-type urbanization on energy efficiency from the perspective of policy analysis.Since the new national development plan of new-type urbanization is about to come out,how to systematically evaluate the effect of new-type urbanization construction,especially its impact on energy efficiency;how to sum up the experience and lessons in the process of new-type urbanization construction;how to clarify the evolution law and characteristics of new-type urbanization have important theoretical and practical value for guiding the implementation of new-type urbanization construction in China in the next step.Based on the investigation of theory and reality,this dissertation raises the following questions:Could new-type urbanization help achieve the goal of “peak carbon dioxide emissions and carbon neutrality” via improving energy efficiency? Does new-type urbanization have an asymmetric impact on energy efficiency,and what are the characteristics of its impact? The research on the above issues can provide theoretical support and decisionmaking basis for realizing the “win-win” situation between the high-quality development of urbanization and the green and low-carbon transformation of energy.Therefore,these are important and urgent problems that need to be investigated from both theoretical and practical perspectives.Accordingly,firstly,after clarifying the concept,connotation and feature of newtype urbanization,energy efficiency and asymmetry via comparative analysis and induction deduction method,breaking through the assumption of space-time separation in existing theoretical analysis,this study builds a theoretical framework for the asymmetric impact of new-type urbanization on energy efficiency from the spatiotemporal perspective,thus further exploring the mechanism of the impact of new-type urbanization on energy efficiency from threshold effect and spatial spillover effect.Secondly,based on the analysis of empirical stylized facts of new-type urbanization and energy efficiency with the panel data of 285 cities in China from 2003 to 2017,under the constraint of heterogeneous factors,this study adopts the dynamic panel threshold model,the spatial convergence model and the spatial threshold model to examine the asymmetric impact of new-type urbanization on energy efficiency from the perspectives of temporal,spatial and spatio-temporal,respectively.Finally,referring to the actual situation in China,systematic policy recommendations are put forward based on the above theoretical and empirical analysis.Conclusions are obtained as follows:(1)In terms of theoretical analysis,new-type urbanization has an asymmetric impact on energy efficiency.Different from economic-centered traditional urbanization,new-type urbanization is a newly developed urbanization mode that emphasizes the coordinated development of natural subsystem,economic subsystem,and social subsystem.From the perspective of spatio-temporal,this dissertation constructs a theoretical framework for the asymmetric impact of new-type urbanization on energy efficiency.The influence mechanism of the threshold effect of new-type urbanization on energy efficiency is revealed from five main channels such as population agglomeration,urban expansion,environmental regulation,industrial development,income improvement.The influence mechanism of the spatial spillover effect of newtype urbanization on energy efficiency is revealed from four main channels such as scientific and technological research and development,enterprise production,public infrastructure,and environmental protection concepts.(2)In terms of empirical stylized facts,during the study period,the level of newtype urbanization in China increases significantly,while energy efficiency shows a trend of fluctuating downward.Overall,there exist large regional differences.Compared with non-pilot cities,the implementation of the comprehensive pilot policy for new-type urbanization significantly inhibits the improvement of energy efficiency.The implementation of the comprehensive pilot policy for new-type urbanization can inhibit the improvement of energy efficiency through green technological progress and green technical efficiency.Under the constraints of heterogeneous factors such as urban industry,resource endowment,urban scale,economic development stage,and urban administrative hierarchy,the implementation of the comprehensive pilot policy for new-type urbanization has a differentiated impact on energy efficiency.(3)In terms of the asymmetric impact of new-type urbanization on energy efficiency from the temporal perspective,new-type urbanization has a significant double threshold effect on energy efficiency.On the whole,new-type urbanization can boost the improvement of energy efficiency.Specifically,in different development stages of new-type urbanization,the improvement effect of new-type urbanization on energy efficiency from strong to weak is in the following order: new-type urbanization in the mature period > new-type urbanization in the growth period > new-type urbanization in the transition period.In addition,under the constraint of heterogeneous factors,new-type urbanization has obvious different impact on energy efficiency.(4)In terms of the asymmetric impact of new-type urbanization on energy efficiency from the spatial perspective,new-type urbanization can promote the spatial convergence of energy efficiency,and increase the convergence speed.China’s energy efficiency has a significant trend of spatial absolute β convergence and spatial conditional β convergence,that is,energy efficiency will converge to a steady-state regardless of whether the economic and social characteristics of the city are controlled.There exist significant trend of club convergence in the three major regions of eastern,central and western regions,as well as the Chengdu-Chongqing urban agglomerations,the urban agglomerations in the middle reaches of the Yangtze River,and the Yangtze River Delta urban agglomerations.New-type urbanization can promote the spatial condition β convergence and spatial club convergence of urban energy efficiency,and can increase the convergence speed of energy efficiency.(5)In terms of the asymmetric impact of new-type urbanization on energy efficiency from the spatio-temporal perspective,the hindering effect of new-type urbanization on energy efficiency will first increase slightly and then decrease rapidly with the progress of new-type urbanization,and shows the typical characteristics of attenuation.With the improvement of the new-type urbanization level,the impact of new-type urbanization on local energy efficiency will change from negative to positive,the inhibitory effect of new-type urbanization on energy efficiency in the neighboring areas will first increase and then decrease,and the hindering effect,on the whole,will first increase slightly and then decrease rapidly.The spatial spillover effects of newtype urbanization in different periods on energy efficiency have typical characteristics of attenuation,and its attenuation trajectory is featured by a wave-like decrease.Compared with the existing literature,the innovation and marginal contribution of this study are mainly reflected in the following aspects:(1)Based on the threshold effect and spatial spillover effect,this study breaks through the symmetric relationship hypothesis between new-type urbanization and energy efficiency,and innovatively constructs a theoretical framework to analyze the asymmetric impact of new-type urbanization on energy efficiency that suitable for the Chinese context from the composite spatio-temporal dimension.(2)Based on cutting-edge asymmetry testing methodology,from a spatio-temporal composite perspective,this study systematically examines the impact of new-type urbanization on energy efficiency by combining linear and nonlinear analysis methods,and spatial and non-spatial analysis methods.