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Has high housing prices affected urban green development?: Evidence from China

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Abstract

This paper empirically examines the specific impact effects and mediates transmission mechanisms of rising housing prices on urban green development using the data from 285 prefecture-level cities in China from 2010 to 2019. The results show that: 1. the rapid rise in housing prices significantly inhibits the improvement of urban green total factor productivity (GTFP) and is not conducive to promoting urban green development; 2. the effect of high housing prices on the GTFP of cities with different population size, geographical location, and resource mastery shows a significant heterogeneous effect; 3. The study of the transmission mechanism finds that soaring urban housing prices not only lead to investment distortions that weaken the overall research and innovation capacity, but also have a “solidifying lock-in” effect on the industrial structure of cities, which in turn creates obstacles to the enhancement of urban green efficiency.

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Notes

  1. Data source: 2020 NEPA annual report.

  2. Urban pollution mainly comes from 3 areas: industrial enterprise production, transportation industry, and real estate industry.

  3. Using the number of employees as the mean value treatment can eliminate the interference and uncertainty caused by factors such as different administrative areas and disparities in household registration and mobile population size among different cities.

  4. The 285 prefecture-level cities include prefecture-level cities in China except those in the Tibet Autonomous Region (Lhasa, Shigatse, Changdu, Linzhi, Shannan, and Nagqu) and eight cities with changed administrative divisions (Danzhou, Sansha, Hami, Chaohu, Bijie, Tongren, Haidong, and Turpan) during the period 2010–2019.

  5. According to the setting of the new city standards in 2018, cities with an urban population of less than 500,000 are designated as small cities; 500,000–1 million are classified as medium-sized cities; 1–5 million are set as large cities; and more than 5 million are defined as mega-cities.

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Funding

The Project is founded by 1. The Youth Program of the National Natural Science Foundation of China (72003052), 2. The General Progam of the Natural Science Foundation of Guangdong Province（2022A1515012089), 3. General Project of China's Education Ministry (21YJA790011).

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Author notes

  1. Min Chu, Liqun Pan and Man Guo these authors contribute equally to this work and share the first authorship.

Authors and Affiliations

  1. FTA Research Center, Dongbei University of Finance and Economics, Liaoning, China

    Min Chu

  2. School of Economics and Statistics, Guangzhou University, Guangzhou, China

    Liqun Pan

  3. School of Economics and Management, Harbin Institute of Technology, Shenzhen Campus, Shenzhen, 518055, China

    Man Guo & Lingyun Xu

  4. Yanztze IDEI, Nanjing University, Nanjing, China

    Jiafeng Zong

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  1. Min Chu
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Correspondence to Man Guo.

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Chu, M., Pan, L., Guo, M. et al. Has high housing prices affected urban green development?: Evidence from China. J Hous and the Built Environ 38, 2185–2206 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10901-023-10034-0

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