土地出让是否会增加雾霾污染?——基于中国地级市面板数据的实证分析

Does Land Leasing Aggravate Haze Pollution?——An Empirical Analysis based on Chinese Prefecture-level Panel Data

现有文献较多关注土地出让行为的价格决定和影响因素,而对其在环境质量层面的负面作用缺乏探讨。基于中国2002—2016年271个地级市社会经济特征数据、PM2.5卫星影像数据、中国土地市场网地块交易数据、中国工业企业数据库等综合面板数据,关注地级市政府土地出让行为对于辖区雾霾污染的影响性质及其作用机制。结果表明:(1)土地出让增加了PM2.5雾霾污染,其促增程度保守估计达到4%;(2)考虑工业土地是否出让于污染行业时,发现地方政府越倾向于将工业用地配置到严重污染行业,则雾霾污染越严重;(3)土地出让虽然可以促进地区经济规模扩张和工业企业进入率,但是这种追求增长速度和企业数量的行为不利于雾霾治理。未来需要不断弱化地方政府土地出让竞争强度,完善土地出让效果评估和动态纠偏机制,以最大程度降低土地出让所引起的环境损失。

China has implemented the policy of reform and opening-up for more than 40 years,and it has made remarkable achievements in economic growth.However,with the rapid growth of China’s economy,there is a serious problem of haze pollution that China needs to deal with.The severe environmental problem in China has put a lot of pressure on Chinese local governments,and they are not allowed to passively wait for the environmental improvement implied by the environmental Kuznets curve hypothesis.Generally speaking,the haze pollution is related to many influencing factors,such as the extensive economic development mode,a large proportion of non-renewable energy consumption with high pollution,isomorphic industrial structure among different administrative jurisdictions,and insufficient implementation of environmental regulation policies.However,compared with these direct factors,there is not much literature which pays enough attention to the negative impact of the land leasing behavior of Chinese local governments,especially the prefecture-level governments.As the monopolists of the primary land leasing market within their jurisdictions,Chinese local governments carry out fierce competition for the enterprise investments.We can call this phenomenon as leasing land for development with Chinese characteristics.The existing literature of Chinese local governments’land leasing behavior pays more attention to its price determination and influencing factors,however,it pays little attention to the negative effects of such behavior on haze pollution.Based on the situation above,this paper focuses on the intensifying role of Chinese local governments’land leasing behavior on haze pollution in their respective administrative jurisdictions.Based on the panel data from 2002 to 2016 of 271 Chinese prefecture-level cities,which combines multiple databases,including satellite imagery derived PM2.5 concentration data from Columbia University,land transactions data from lanchina.com,and data from China Industrial Enterprises Database,we get the following research results.(1)Chinese prefecture-level governments’land leasing behavior aggravates the regional PM2.5 pollution by at least 4%.This conclusion is still valid after a number of robustness tests,including the instrumental variable regression.It is worth noting that one of the instrumental variables selected in this paper is the number of newly added national and provincial development zones in the current year.(2)Through the structural analysis of considering whether industrial land is leased to those heavily polluting industries,it is found that the more local governments tend to allocate industrial lands to heavily polluting industries,the more serious their haze pollution level will be.(3)In view of the indirect mechanism of the main conclusion,this paper finds that land leasing increases PM2.5 pollution by stimulating local governments to pursue the speed of economic expansion and enhancing the entry rate of industrial enterprises.In the future,Chinese governments at all levels need to improve the market-oriented land leasing management system,bring all the land leasing fees into the local budget account,continuously weaken the competition intensity of local governments’land leasing behavior,and improve the performance evaluation and dynamic correction mechanism of the land leasing.More importantly,China also needs to recognize the unsustainability of land leasing to obtain fiscal revenue,and then adjust the official assessment mechanism in which GDP growth rate is the main content.These measures mentioned above can minimize the environmental loss caused by local land leasing as much as possible.