ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Environ. Sci.
Sec. Environmental Policy and Governance
Volume 13 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fenvs.2025.1639793
This article is part of the Research TopicMoving Towards Sustainable Development: Exploring the Impact of Land-Use Policies on Land Green Utilization EfficiencyView all 17 articles
Inclusive Land Ecological Benefits: Assessing the Eco-Efficiency Returns of China's Green Industrial Policy Based on a Quasi-Natural Experiment
Provisionally accepted
- 1School of Economics and Management, University of Architecture and Technology Huaqing College, Xi'an, China
- 2Minzu University of China School of Economics, Beijing, China
- 3School of Marxism, Guangxi University, Nanning, China
Select one of your emails
You have multiple emails registered with Frontiers:
Notify me on publication
Please enter your email address:
If you already have an account, please login
You don't have a Frontiers account ? You can register here
Green industrial policy(GIP) is a crucial instrument for driving a green, low-carbon transition. While prior research has predominantly examined its role in enhancing firms' green performance, its potential contribution to the ecological transformation of land use has been largely overlooked. This study uses panel data from 287 prefecture-level cities in China over the period 2007-2022 and employs a multi-period difference-in-differences (DID) framework, leveraging the quasi-natural experiment provided by the "Comprehensive Demonstration Cities for Energy Saving and Emission Reduction" pilot program, to investigate the impact of green industrial policy on urban land use eco-efficiency(ULUEE). Our findings show that GIP significantly improves ULUEE, and this result remains robust across various robustness checks. Mechanism analysis indicates that the policy stimulates urban green technological innovation and optimizes the energy consumption structure, both of which contribute to higher ULUEE. Heterogeneity analysis further reveals that the policy's positive effects are especially pronounced in resource-declining cities, small and medium-sized cities, old industrial base cities, cities with lower levels of scientific and educational development, and cities where public environmental concern is greater. These results imply that the ecological benefits of GIP are broadly inclusive, albeit contingent upon the public's environmental awareness. By examining GIP through the lens of land use, this paper uncovers its ecological value and offers a novel pathway for enhancing ULUEE.
Keywords: green industrial policy, Urban land use eco-efficiency, Inclusive growth, green transformation, Ecological value
Received: 02 Jun 2025; Accepted: 17 Jul 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Li, Xiao, Chen and Huang. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Chunlei Huang, School of Marxism, Guangxi University, Nanning, China
Disclaimer: All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article or claim that may be made by its manufacturer is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.