Research On Impacts Of Urbanization On Eco-efficiency In China

Urbanization is the inevitable way leading to modernization for a country or a region.After more than 40 years' development,urbanization in China has become an economic engine.Meanwhile,bottleneck effect from resource and environment is getting more and more obvious.Thus,New Urbanization with an energy-saving,intelligent,green and low-carbon pattern is a necessary part in the high-quality development of our country.Eco-efficiency is an important indicator measuring running efficiency of economy-resource-environment system.So analyzing how urbanization affects eco-efficiency and its regional difference help to provide theoretical foundation for improving institutional design,defining next main emphasis in the urbanization and realizing coordination between economic outputs and environmental costs.Based on existing theories and researches,this article explains mechanism about implications of urbanization on eco-efficiency from three angles including population agglomeration,main transmission variables and stage characteristics of urbanization.Next the article takes empirical tests on the mechanism above.Firstly,this paper calculates eco-efficiencies of 30 provinces in China from 2003 to 2017 by Super-SBM-DEA model and states its spatial and temporal change.Secondly,regression analyses are proceeded in order to reflect implication of urbanization on eco-efficiency from national and regional aspects.Main conclusions are:(1)The overall trend of eco-efficiency is decreasing while in the small fluctuation range.Eco-efficiencies among eastern,middle and western part of China are in descending order.The gap between different provinces is clear and has experienced fluctuation-shrinkage-amplification change.(2)On a national scale,the relation between urbanization and eco-efficiency is U-shaped and the overall level of urbanization has already exceeded inflection point.Besides,the effect caused by urbanization through structural change is not obvious while urbanization can enlarge the positive effect of technological progress so as to exceed its rebounding effect and improve eco-efficiency.(3)On a regional scale,although the U-shaped relation exists in eastern,middle and western part,only urbanization in western part of China still will impede improvement of eco-efficiency.Besides,similar to national scale,urbanization can enlarge positive effect of technological progress so as to improve eco-efficiency.But only in eastern part,driven by urbanization,structural transition can obviously exploit its advantages on environmental protection and low-carbon emission to the full so as to boost eco-efficiency.The last part of paper provides recommendations about improving eco-efficiency in the context of urbanization.