Ecological Well-Being Performance Measurements And Influencing Factors In Five Major Urban Agglomerations In China

Since the reform and opening up,the level of urbanisation has increased significantly,with China’s urbanisation rate reaching 65.22% in 2022.While making significant progress,China is also facing a series of ecological and environmental problems such as the scarcity of resources and environmental degradation.In recent years,the Chinese government has attached great importance to the construction of a new type of urbanisation.The 14 th Five-Year Plan states that a new type of urbanisation with people at its core will be built in depth,and an urban pattern of coordinated development of large,medium and small cities with urban agglomerations as the main form and coordinated regional development as the overall goal will be established.Among them,the five core city clusters of Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei,Yangtze River Delta,Pearl River Delta,Middle reaches of Yangtze River and Chengdu-Chongqing have an important position in the urban cluster development strategy.Under the constraint of environmental resources,how to obtain the optimal welfare output with less ecological resource input is the focus of China’s new urbanisation construction.And improving the level of ecological well-being performance of urban agglomerations is beneficial to promoting the construction of ecological civilisation and enhancing people’s sense of well-being.Against this background,this paper firstly composes the concept and connotation of ecological well-being performance on the basis of existing literature,takes the evaluation of the current situation of ecological well-being performance development→ analysis of influencing factors → proposing improvement countermeasures as the main line,combines the relevant theories of steady-state economy,welfare economy and other domestic and foreign scholars’ literature,from the perspective of ecological resource input-welfare output The evaluation system for measuring the ecological well-being performance of urban agglomerations is established by using the entropy-weighted SBM model with non-desired outputs and the global Malmquist index model to measure the ecological well-being performance of China’s five major urban agglomerations(93 prefecture-level cities)during 2011-2020,and to evaluate and analyse the performance values in terms of static time-series evolution and dynamic evolution respectively.Based on the measured ecological well-being performance values,the Tobit model is applied to investigate the main factors affecting the ecological well-being performance of urban agglomerations and propose effective measures to improve the ecological well-being performance of urban agglomerations in order to achieve high-quality sustainable development of urban agglomerations.The main findings of this study are as follows:(1)The development of ecological well-being performance of urban agglomerations from 2011 to 2020 is relatively stable and the overall level has improved,but there is still a need to further improve the coordination between ecological environment and economic benefits.(2)The level of ecological well-being performance varies between urban agglomerations,and those with a better level of economic development have a relatively higher ecological well-being performance.There is a positive relationship between the ecological well-being performance of each prefecture-level city and the economic strength of the urban agglomerations.(3)Technological progress and technical efficiency play a major role in the development of urban agglomerations,and are important drivers of their improved ecological well-being performance.(4)Industrial structure,environmental protection,openness,technological progress and population density are the key factors contributing to the improvement of the ecological well-being performance of urban agglomerations,with mega and super cities being more significantly influenced by industrial structure,environmental protection and openness,while large cities are more significantly influenced by technological progress and population density.Based on the previous study,we conclude and propose countermeasures to help improve the ecological performance of the five major urban agglomerations,promote the formation of a new pattern of green development,advance China’s new urbanization path,and actively promote the construction of ecological civilization to take new steps.