Ziyuan Kexue (Aug 2024)
Spatial spillover effects of smart city pilot on neighboring environments
Abstract
[Objective] Smart cities apply the next generation information technology to resource and environmental management to promote sustainable urban development. Existing studies focus on the local environmental governance effects of smart cities, but ignore their possible impacts on the environmental pollution of neighboring areas and differential spillover effects on neighboring smart cities and non-smart cities. [Methods] Based on the panel data of 217 prefecture-level cities in China from 2005 to 2020, the smart city pilot was taken as a quasi-natural experiment, and the local area-neighboring area pollution effect of smart city construction was evaluated by using the spatial Dubin differential model. [Results] The study found that: (1) Smart city policies had significant positive spillover effects on neighboring area pollution emissions under the four spatial matrices, and the results are still valid after the robustness test of data winsorization, falsification test, exclusion of other policy effects, and endogeneity test. (2) The analysis of the spatiotemporal dynamic effect of policies showed that the spillover effects of smart cities on pollution had a time lag, while the spatial distance followed the attenuation law of geographical distance. (3) The mechanism study showed that the construction of smart cities had a regional innovation effect, which reduced its pollution through knowledge spillover, but led to the transfer of traditional heavy industry and heavy polluting industries to neighboring non-smart cities and increased their pollution. [Conclusion] Although smart city policies optimize the local environment, they produce a “beggar-thy-neighbor” environmental pollution phenomenon, especially that mainly neighboring non-smart cities bear the pollution transfer. The government should emphasize the concept of collaborative governance in smart city policies and strengthen the awareness of regional joint prevention and control between local governments in neighboring areas, especially between smart cities and neighboring non-smart cities.
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