Impact of environmental target constraints on local governments' land transfers in clean-production industries
The allocation of land resources plays an important role in guiding and supporting industrial development,and optimizing the allocation of industrial land is important and fundamental for China to realize the green transformation of its development mode.From the perspective of combining environmental policies with the performance assessment of local leading officials,this study took the panel data of 280 prefecture-level cities in China from 2007 to 2020 as a research sample and empirically investigated the impact of en-vironmental target constraints on local governments' land transfers in clean-production industries and its mechanisms by using the fixed effect model,instrumental variable method,and mediation effect model,respectively.The moderating effect model was further used to analyze the moderating role of economic growth pressure and financial pressure faced by local governments.The results showed that:① Environmental target constraints could significantly encourage local governments to increase land transfers in clean-production in-dustries.The result remained robust after addressing potential endogeneity and performing a series of robustness tests.From the per-spective of differences in land supply policies,industrial structure,and characteristics of leading officials,the promoting effect of envi-ronmental target constraints on local governments' land transfers in clean-production industries was particularly prominent in cities hav-ing sufficient land resources,whose economy was highly dependent on the industrial sector,and whose incumbent mayors were not lo-cals or no more than 55 years old.② The mechanism analysis revealed that environmental target constraints incentivized local govern-ments to increase land transfers in clean-production industries by improving the intensity of environmental regulation and increasing the supervision of environmental monitoring.③ Further research showed that economic growth pressure faced by local governments un-dermined the promoting effect of environmental target constraints on land transfers in clean-production industries,while financial pres-sure had a synergistic effect with environmental target constraints.The above conclusions indicate that the'strict constraint'policies on environmental targets implemented by the central government can incentivize local governments to favor the allocation of green in-dustries when transferring industrial lands,which provides important practical implications for China to achieve a win-win goal of envi-ronmental pollution control and resource allocation optimization.