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Promoting cultivated land use efficiency (CLUE) coordinated development in various major function-oriented zones is a measure to deal with unbalanced development of territorial space in China. Taking the optimized development, key development, agricultural production, ecological function, and ecological economic zones of Zhejiang province as research objects, this study incorporated agricultural carbon emission into the measurement framework of CLUE and analyzed the regional disparity and the convergence of CLUE from 2008 to 2017, using slack-based measure model (SBM), the Theil index, and convergence theory. The main results are as follows: (1) The CLUE value that considered agricultural carbon emissions was lower than the CLUE value that did not consider agricultural carbon emissions; thus, agricultural carbon emissions had a negative effect on CLUE. (2) The CLUE value of the five major function-oriented zones showed an increasing trend; after ranking the CLUE value, the CLUE of the optimized development zones was the highest, followed by the ecological function, ecological economic, and key development zones, and that of the agricultural production zones was the lowest, indicating significant regional disparity. (3) The overall disparity of CLUE presented an upward trend, and the within-regional disparity is the main source of the overall disparity. (4) Neither σ convergence nor absolute β convergence occurred in the CLUE of the five major function-oriented zones, but conditional β convergence occurred among the optimized development and ecological economic zones. Although the planning of major function-oriented zones reflects the regional disparity and convergence of CLUE to some extent, the CLUE under the control of major function-oriented zones is not consistent with the function positioning.

Severe land shortage causes a higher demand for domestic and foreign land‐intensive products. As a result, resource utilization, and related environmental issues, will increase in urban areas. To this respect, the analysis of the impact of environmental regulation on urban land use efficiency helps to identify potential points for interventions designed to ensure sustainable land use. This study first introduces a theoretical framework to investigate the micro‐transmission mechanism of environmental regulation on urban land use efficiency. Our profit decision‐making model concludes that the impact of environmental regulation on urban land use efficiency is influenced by changes in the industrial structure. Empirically, our preliminary analysis suggests that in addition to population density, both formal and informal environmental regulation can promote urban land use efficiency, with a significant spatial heterogeneity across the sample regions. Further, this study shows a remarkable double‐threshold relationship between formal environmental regulation and urban land use efficiency in China. We clarify and confirm that environmental regulation promoted urban land use efficiency only when regulation intensity was higher than 0.8612. Environmental regulation increased urban land use efficiency in high‐level industrial rationalization areas, whereas it had the opposite effect in low‐level ones. Furthermore, there was a clear marginal diminishing effect of the impact of environmental regulation on urban land use efficiency when the optimization of the industrial structure was set as a threshold variable.

Unlocking the relationship between regional integration and urban green development efficiency (UGDE) is of great importance for boosting regional high-quality development and promoting sustainable urban development patterns. Although studies have analyzed the spatio-temporal evolution and influencing factors of regional integration and UGDE, the impact of regional integration on UGDE remains untested. In this paper, we construct a conceptual framework to analyze how regional integration can influence UGDE through promoting the factors mobility and optimizing the industrial layout. In addition, we further choose the urban agglomeration in the middle reaches of the Yangtze River (UAMRYR), a rapidly growing urban agglomeration in central China, as a case to investigate the spatial spillover effect of regional integration on UGDE from 2003 to 2017. We quantify the UGDE with a random forest model, then estimate the underlying determinants of the UGDE with a spatial Durbin model. Results indicated that (1) the regional integration level and the UGDE index of the UAMRYR and its three sub-urban agglomerations show an increasing trend; (2) for every 1% increase in the level of regional integration, the level of UGDE will increase by 0.8307%; (3) the impact of regional integration on UGDE has obvious regional heterogeneity; while playing a promoting effect in the Wuhan urban agglomeration and the Changsha-Zhuzhou-Xiangtan urban agglomeration, it shows an inhibitory effect in the Poyang Lake urban agglomeration. We conclude that regional integration in agglomeration areas can accelerate the factors flow and optimize the industrial layout for improving UGDE.