Can Land Marketization Help Reduce Industrial Pollution?

Industrial pollution control is a difficult problem in China’s current economic transformation, and the Chinese government has implemented many measures to deal with it. However, little research has focused on the relationship between land policy and industrial pollution. Based on the theoretical discussion of the mechanism influencing the market-oriented reform of industrial land (mainly refer to the marketization of land conveyance price and the openness of land conveyance process) on urban industrial pollution, we constructed an analytical framework by linking land policy with industrial pollution. Then, we constructed an econometric model and chose the statistical data of 104 large- and medium-sized cities in mainland China from 2003 to 2016. The results indicate that with the marketization of the industrial land conveyance price, urban industrial pollution is presenting an inverted U-shaped change trend. For cities in different development stages of industrialization, there is no difference in the impact of industrial land conveyance price on urban industrial pollution. However, the openness of industrial land conveyance promotes and inhibits the urban industrial pollution in the stages of industrialization and post-industrialization, respectively. Finally, this paper puts forward some suggestions on how to control industrial pollution from the perspective of further improving the industrial land conveyance mechanism.