| The 18 th Party Congress proposed to "take the new type of urbanization road with Chinese characteristics",which kicked off the development of urbanization with equal emphasis on scale and quality,and the Fifth Plenary Session of the 19 th CPC Central Committee proposed to "promote coordinated regional development and promote a new type of urbanization with people at its core".In 2022,the National Development and Reform Commission(NDRC)issued the "Implementation Plan for the New Type of Urbanization in the 14 th Five-Year Plan",proposing to "adhere to the new type of urbanization road with Chinese characteristics".It seems that building a new type of urbanization and promoting the coordination of economy and ecology is the inevitable way to achieve high-quality economic development in China.At the same time,with the dramatic increase in air pollution incidents,the impact of air pollution as an "invisible killer" on urbanization has received increasing attention from society,but few systematic studies have been found.Then,a realistic question worthy of consideration is raised: Does air pollution reduce the level of urbanization development? What is the mechanism behind its impact? Is there heterogeneity in the impact of air pollution on urbanization development? How should China further promote the construction of lowcarbon cities in the future? In the context of promoting the construction of new urbanization and developing low-carbon green economy,it is particularly important to explore the feedback effect of air pollution on urbanization.Through combing and summarizing the existing literature,this paper firstly introduces the basic concepts of air pollution and urbanization,elaborates the relevant theories such as environmental Kuznets curve,urban development stage theory and environmental economics,analyzes the influence mechanism of air pollution on urbanization,and clarifies the theoretical basis of this paper;then the temporal and spatial distribution characteristics of PM2.5 and AQI,the distribution characteristics of urbanization,nighttime light The current situation of air pollution and urbanization is explained in terms of the construction of data and distribution characteristics;finally,based on the panel data of prefecture-level cities from 2005-2019(where AQI index is counted from 2014,so its data are from 2014-2019),the fixed-effect model,two-stage least squares method and moderating effect model are used to empirically analyze the air pollution on urbanization and the mechanism of the impact.Meanwhile,to ensure the robustness of the results,a series of robustness analyses are conducted in this paper,and further heterogeneity analyses are conducted in terms of regional characteristics,economic scale and city size.The results of this paper show that(1)air pollution significantly reduces the development level of urbanization.Among them,for each percentage point increase in PM2.5 concentration,the level of urbanization will decrease by 1.175 percentage points;for each percentage point increase in AQI value,the level of urbanization will decrease by 0.215 percentage points.(2)The heterogeneity test shows that,in terms of regional characteristics,air pollution has a more significant impact on the urbanization level of northern cities and resource-based cities compared to southern cities and non-resourcebased cities;in terms of economic scale,the impact of air pollution on urbanization is significantly greater in the central and western regions than in the eastern regions,while the impact of air pollution on the urbanization level of second-and third-tier cities is significantly greater than that of the remaining cities;in terms of city size In terms of urban scale,the impact of air pollution on the urbanization level of small-scale cities is significantly greater than that of large and medium-scale cities.(3)The mechanism analysis shows that economic growth has a significant moderating effect with human capital,while population size does not have a significant moderating effect. |
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