A Spatial Convergence Analysis of China's Urban Eco-Efficiency: Perspectives Based on Local Government Competition.

Regional collaborative governance of the ecological environment is an important way to promote the sustainable development of urbanization, and local government competition is a characteristic institutional factor that is often ignored in the process of regional ecological environmental governance in China. This study selected the panel data of 278 prefecture-level cities from 2006 to 2018 in China, and used the spatial convergence regression model and the mediation effect model to analyze the spatial convergence of urban eco-efficiency (UEE) and its mechanism from the perspective of local government competition. The results show several empirical patterns. First, the UEE follows a tendency of convergence that narrows the regional gap of urban eco-efficiency, and spatial interaction factors are the keys affecting the convergence of UEE. Second, local government competition, as a characteristic institutional factor, plays an important role in promoting the spatial convergence of UEE, and the effect of administrative distance proximity competition is stronger than that of geographical distance proximity competition. The UEE increases by 0.114 percentage points when its degree of competitive pressure increases by 1 percentage point. Third, the competitive pressure leads to strict environmental regulation policies, which generally improve UEE and thus narrow its gap with advanced cities. Finally, local government competition has heterogeneous effects on urban eco-efficiency. Specifically, under the pressure of local government competition, the environmental regulations improve the UEE in the east and key environmental protection cities, while the central and non-key environmental protection cities experience the opposite effect. The results of this study suggest that if UEE is further introduced into the administrative performance evaluation index systems of local officials, the regional gap of environmental and economic development could be narrowed through ecological competition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]