Differences in Urban Built-Up Land Expansion in Zhengzhou and Changsha, China: An Approach Based on Different Geographical Features

Can Market Reforms Curb the Expansion of Industrial Land?—Based on the Panel Data Analysis of Five National-Level Urban Agglomerations

As China entered marketization in the late 1980s, it soon established a market economy system and implemented tax-sharing reforms. Driven by the marketization, local governments have rapidly developed the economy under the pressure of fiscal competition caused by the reform of the tax-sharing system. Industrial land is an important factor of local economic development, and it enables local governments to invest heavily in the industrial sector to promote economic development, leading to urban expansion. In order to shed light on the relationship between the market reforms implemented by the Chinese government and the expansion of urban industrial land, this paper used the data of 77 prefecture-level cities in China’s five national-level urban agglomerations as research samples from 2007 to 2018. We first constructed the marketization rate of industrial land (MIL) and used the panel data model to examine whether China′s market reform will curb the expansion of industrial land. The results showed that: (1) land market reform can restrain the scale of industrial land expansion, and the impact is different in different urban agglomerations; (2) under the effect of marketization, foreign direct investment (FDI) has restrained the expansion of industrial land to a certain extent. The amount of industrial investment (AII), the ratio of secondary industry to GDP structure (RSG), and the number of industrial enterprises (NIE) will aggravate the expansion of industrial land. We suggest that the Chinese government should deepen the reform of land marketization and develop a differentiated land market mechanism. It is also necessary for local governments to develop stock land, improve the efficiency of industrial land use, increase the investment in advanced technology, and improve the intensive utilization of industrial land. The research provides a reference for other countries in the world that are developing in a transitional period to restrain unlimited land expansion and save land resources in the process of economic development.

Spatiotemporal Dynamics and Driving Forces of Urban Land-Use Expansion: A Case Study of the Yangtze River Economic Belt, China

It is important to analyze the expansion of an urban area and the factors that drive its expansion. Therefore, this study is based on Defense Meteorological Satellite Program Operational Linescan System (DMSP/OLS) night lighting data, using the landscape index, spatial expansion strength index, compactness index, urban land fractal index, elasticity coefficient, the standard deviation ellipse, spatial correlation analysis, and partial least squares regression to analyze the spatial and temporal evolution of urban land expansion and its driving factors in the Yangtze River Economic Belt (YREB) over a long period of time. The results show the following: Through the calculation of the eight landscape pattern indicators, we found that during the study period, the number of cities and towns and the area of urban built-up areas in the YREB are generally increasing. Furthermore, the variations in these landscape pattern indicators not only show more frequent exchanges and interactions between the cities and towns of the YREB, but also reflect significant instability and irregularity of the urbanization development in the YREB. The spatial expansion intensity indices of 1992–1999, 1999–2006, and 2006–2013 were 0.03, 0.16, and 0.34, respectively. On the whole, the urban compactness of the YREB decreased with time, and the fractal dimension increased slowly with time. Moreover, the long axis and the short axis of the standard deviation ellipse of the YREB underwent a small change during the inspection period. The spatial distribution generally showed the pattern of “southwest-north”. In terms of gravity shift, during the study period, the center of gravity moved from northeast to southwest. In addition, the Moran's I values for the four years of 1992, 1999, 2006, and 2013 were 0.451, 0.495, 0.506, and 0.424, respectively. Furthermore, by using correlation analysis, we find that the correlation coefficients between these four driving indicators and the urban expansion of the YREB were: 0.963, 0.998, 0.990 and 0.994, respectively. Through the use of partial least squares regression, we found that in 1992-2013, the four drivers of urban land expansion in the YREB were ranked as follows: gross domestic product (GDP), total fixed asset investment, urban population, total retail sales of consumer goods.