Economic coordination development from the perspective of cross‐regional urban agglomerations in China

Abstract

The construction of urban agglomeration systems is of great significance for China to implement an innovation‐driven strategy and promote regional coordinated development. Taking panel data of 61 counties or municipal cities in the Beijing‐Tianjin‐Hebei urban agglomeration and the Yangtze River Delta urban agglomeration as the research object in this paper, the gravitational model is improved to measure cross‐regional economic linkages, and a threshold model is conducted to reveal the nonlinear influencing mechanism within the variable of advanced industrial structure, economic tie, and vitality of consumption on economic‐coordinated development severally. Moreover, the influence mechanism model is proposed by considering the urban‐group effect, and its effect is tested in the bootstrap cross‐validation procedure. The empirical results show that the coordinated development of regional economy depends to a large extent on the closeness of economic linkages rather than geographic location, while the ability of economic coordination development from the aspect of cross‐regional urban agglomerations has been affected by the nonlinear effects of economic tie and the vitality of consumption, and more dependent on the setting of the advanced industrial structure's level. In addition, the ability of regional economic coordinated development of the two urban agglomerations has an obvious city‐group effect, while economic tie, advanced industrial structure, education level, population density, and public goods and services have a non‐negligible effect.

Sustainable and coordinated development: Green transition as a new driving force of regional economy

“…Green development has been a concept for more than 50 years, as environmental pollution, climate change, and resource consumption have been identified as problems associated with the traditional pattern of industrialization and urbanization (Pearce et al, 1989;Xu, Liu, & Lu, 2022;Xu, Liu, & Sun, 2022). In essence, it is an approach to economic growth and social development that priorities efficiency, harmony and sustainability, and it has become a major global trend.…”

“…Regarding the existing literature, scholars are primarily concerned with the measurement of green growth. Some studies quantify the costs and benefits of environment and resources, and combine them with economic growth to characterize the green growth rate of the economy (Sohag et al, 2019;Xu, Liu, & Lu, 2022;Xu, Liu, & Sun, 2022); and some studies incorporate the weight method into the indicator system consisted of environmental governance, resource allocation efficiency, energy consumption and economic development (Cheng et al, 2021;Wang et al, 2022). In addition, some studies construct SFA or DEA models to measure green total factor productivity, which incorporates not only expected outputs such as GDP, but also unexpected outputs such as pollutants and carbon emissions (Liu et al, 2022;Liu & Li, 2019).…”

“…Green transition (GT), the promotion and deepening of green development and green growth, is a new developmental approach proposed in response to environmental pollution, which primarily resolves the constraints between resources and the environment in the process of sustainable development according to its definition and connotation, (Hamdouch & Depret, 2010;Xu, Liu, & Lu, 2022;Xu, Liu, & Sun, 2022;Zhai & An, 2020). To quantify the measurement and influencing factors of the GT, scholars concentrate on the green development index, green development performance, and green growth efficiency.…”

“…In economic production activities, the promotion of green development or green growth is the increase in green productivity, which is dependent on the GT and indicates that the environment is in good condition (Ben Jebli et al, 2019;Zhu et al, 2018). In addition, the rise in green productivity indicates that economic production activities safeguard the environment to some extent (Liu & Li, 2019;Xu, Liu, & Lu, 2022;Xu, Liu, & Sun, 2022). Moreover, the improvement of the GT has contributed to the enhancement of the quality of regional economic development, facilitated the coordinated allocation of various resources between and within regions, and stimulated the coordinated development of regional economies (Liu et al, 2022;Xu et al, 2021).…”

“…Taking environmental pollutant PM 2.5 as an example, as shown in Figure 1, although the inverted 'U-shaped' hypothesis has been followed for a long time in the majority of countries, the PM 2.5 in the world's major economies has increased since 2019, which partially reflects the worsening of global environmental problems. Therefore, in recent years, green development, green growth and green transformation have progressively become the theme of sustainable development in the field of the regional economy, and an increasing number of scholars have focused on this topic (Jan et al, 2022;Xu, Liu, & Lu, 2022;Xu, Liu, & Sun, 2022).…”