Environmental Regulation, Land Use Effiiciency, and Industrial Structure Upgrading: Test Analysis Based on Spatial Durbin Model and Threshold Effect

Environment regulation, through land adjustment, promotes changes in industrial structure and facilitates regional economic transformation, offering a new path for renovating traditional industrialization and urbanization trajectories. Based on panel data from 128 prefecture-level cities in the Yangtze River Economic Belt in China from 2000 to 2020, this chapter employs a spatial Durbin model to analyze the relationship between environmental regulation, land use efficiency, and industrial structure upgrading. Considering that different intensities of environmental regulation may lead to differentiated impacts on land use structure, a panel threshold model is further set to examine how environmental regulation affects industrial structure upgrading through its influence on land use efficiency. The results indicate that formal environmental regulation has significant positive spatial effects on rationalization and upgrading of industrial structure, with coefficients of 0.1734 and 0.2854, respectively, manifested by the forced transfer of polluting industries to neighboring provinces. Nonformal environmental regulation has a negative spillover effect on neighboring provinces, which is detrimental to economic growth in adjacent provinces, although this effect is not pronounced. Land use efficiency (LUE) has a significantly negative effect on industrial structure rationalization but a significantly positive effect on upgrading. Heterogeneous environmental regulation exhibits a distinct “dual-threshold effect” on industrial upgrading through its influence on land use efficiency. When the intensity threshold of environmental regulation is within [0.0315, 0.0886], environmental regulation continues to have a suppressive effect on land use efficiency and industrial structure upgrading. When the intensity of environmental regulation exceeds the threshold of 0.0886, environmental regulation has a positive but insignificant effect on land use efficiency, indicating an interactive promotion. As the intensity of environmental regulation increases from weak to strong, a “strong suppression - weak suppression - interactive promotion” dual-threshold effect is observed on the upgrading of the manufacturing industry through adjustments in land use efficiency.